franz schaefer wrote:
On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 09:16:10PM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote
That's not true; plenty of proprietary software vendors give their software away at no charge, and some (and not enough imho) free software vendors charge for theirs.
where of course the ones who give away proprietary software at a 0 price tag do it just to establish or tighen their monopoly grip.
It doesn't matter what the motive is; the point was about the cost of production.
if you count the LOC of openoffice and divide it by the number of m$-office installations you get a price tag of about 1 euro or below (as an order of magnitude).
Lines of code are not a good indicator of investment, and the number of installations of a competing product doesn't tell you much about the return on that investment. I'm not sure what your point here is.
what the article does not mention but what is important here: with free software you only have to develop once and do not have 3, 4 or 5 parallel development teams who can not share their code and have to reinvent the weel each on their own...
What, like GNOME/KDE/XFCE/GNUStep/...? Or OpenOffice.org / KOffice / Abiword & Gnumeric ...? Or all the different GNU/Linux distributions? Or Drupal / Joomla / CMSmadeSimple / TYPO3 / Plone / etc etc (there really are countless examples here).
Code sharing happens in the proprietary world - a lot of development tools companies make their money exactly that way - and wheel re-invention happens in the free software world.
I don't know if anyone has done a proper study, but it's not really obvious to me that proprietary software is any more wheel-reinventy than free software is...
the marxist view (labor theory of value) and the neoricardian view is more appropriate here when calculating overall utility vor society: you devide the number of working hours and multiply it with a price of workhour and devide it by the number of copies required.
Doesn't really give much insight to the commercial mindset though.
Cheers,
Alex.