A generally-preferable alternative to “worse is better” is, in my mind, “real artists ship”. (This is to say: availability is a prerequisite for adoption, while quality only ranks available options.)
Even the VHS vs Betamax situation is not one of quality so much as one of availability: VHS’s killer app at the time of its release (timer-based recording of full television programs when the owner wasn’t around to watch them) simply wasn’t something Beta devices could do at the time because Beta recording times were too short (mostly because of the smaller tape). A VHS could record an entire movie at a time when Beta could just barely record a half-hour television show – and at this time, it would have been another decade before commercial home video releases started to appear.
Lisp vs Unix vs bitty-boxes is shades of the same thing: in the late 70s and early 80s, if you didn’t have institutional associations, you weren’t getting access to a lisp machine or a mini running unix, so it didn’t matter what was ‘better’ on a technical level.
But we short-change our customers, and we cheapen our craft, when we put up with this sort of thinking.
There’d be less money in software if we didn’t short-change our customers, and if we didn’t cheapen our craft they wouldn’t be able (or willing!) to afford it in the first place.
How they collect the money they invest in open source largely depends.
Google, Facebook and several other SV sell their users’ data (either directly or through corporate software proxy that let their customers use the data without seeing them, eg through advertising or fake news spreading…) Others like Microsoft monetize on some infrastructures whose adoption is challenged by free software and open source software. Other sell hardware or services based on open source software they develop, again Google but also Amazon and even Microsoft.
In all cases open sourcing software is a marketing technique: it’s a price competition dressed like a philanthropic gift.
Free software instead is an act of creative curiosity from hackers. It can be commercial, but the curiosity is the core value that lead development.
A generally-preferable alternative to “worse is better” is, in my mind, “real artists ship”. (This is to say: availability is a prerequisite for adoption, while quality only ranks available options.)
Even the VHS vs Betamax situation is not one of quality so much as one of availability: VHS’s killer app at the time of its release (timer-based recording of full television programs when the owner wasn’t around to watch them) simply wasn’t something Beta devices could do at the time because Beta recording times were too short (mostly because of the smaller tape). A VHS could record an entire movie at a time when Beta could just barely record a half-hour television show – and at this time, it would have been another decade before commercial home video releases started to appear.
Lisp vs Unix vs bitty-boxes is shades of the same thing: in the late 70s and early 80s, if you didn’t have institutional associations, you weren’t getting access to a lisp machine or a mini running unix, so it didn’t matter what was ‘better’ on a technical level.
There’d be less money in software if we didn’t short-change our customers, and if we didn’t cheapen our craft they wouldn’t be able (or willing!) to afford it in the first place.
Pss.. I’ll tell you a secret… don’t tell it anyone… initially software used to be free by default!
Still today, hackers all over the world produce amazing software for freedom.
And many companies give away their software for free.
Ssshhtt… don’t tell it anyone… ;-)
How do those companies pay their employees?
With money, I suppose. :-)
How they collect the money they invest in open source largely depends.
Google, Facebook and several other SV sell their users’ data (either directly or through corporate software proxy that let their customers use the data without seeing them, eg through advertising or fake news spreading…) Others like Microsoft monetize on some infrastructures whose adoption is challenged by free software and open source software. Other sell hardware or services based on open source software they develop, again Google but also Amazon and even Microsoft.
In all cases open sourcing software is a marketing technique: it’s a price competition dressed like a philanthropic gift.
Free software instead is an act of creative curiosity from hackers. It can be commercial, but the curiosity is the core value that lead development.
But this is another story…
Less than trillions of dollars is still trillions of dollars, though.