Paying for software?

Jeff Atwood writes about the allure of $0 software. Some developers are attracted to open source not because of access to the source, or the peer review, or the fact that people just write cleaner code when someone might read it, but just because of the price.

Same goes for books. Why spend four hours groveling through free online tutorials when you could find the answer in a few minutes in "Wicked Cool %s" or "%s in a Nutshell"?

The problem isn't how much money is going to the software or publishing company. The problem is the total cost of paying for something in a company environment. You can drop $120 on an expense-account dinner, but $30 for Software? Your time to handle the payment is easily ten times that. It makes a day or so of

And researching software is more fun than navigating the payment system anyway. And it looks more like work.

Open source might be nipping at the ankles of large software companies, but it devastated the companies that take the 1/4 page ads in the back of Dr. Dobbs'. Big companies can sell you a huge package of code, which spread out the transaction costs. Maybe book publishers should do something similar. Get companies to pay once and get n copies of everything.

Would you use more paid-license software if it were easier to pay?

Syndicated 2008-04-18 20:38:01 from dmarti's blog