Re: Python (was Re: I did not inhale)

On 2024-08-20 09:44, David Brown wrote:

That's an easy claim to make - saying something that sounds obvious and calling it a "fact".  But that does not make it true in general.

But sometimes it does.

There are endless numbers of situations where price and cost are highly out of sync.  And there are endless different ways in which price and cost can be measured for different things.

Yes

Software development, licensing and sale is /totally/ different.  The cost models are completely different.  Base cost is high, but unit cost is near zero.

Yes, and that is the problem. Not really a unique problem, e.g. books, music records etc.

One could argue that there cannot be software market at all for costs-intensive stuff like OS and compilers similarly to the communal infrastructure like roads etc. That might be but it is another question.

 That might be a slightly less bad model than the traditional cost/price market model, but it's not good either.

... counting the potholes ...

Software is in a very different category from "real" things - and indeed there are many different categories of software with very different economic models.  Any attempt to compare it to traditional economic market theory is doomed to be of little relevance.

Maybe, but then we have what we have.

The success or failure of software companies or products is mostly a combination of skill, hard work, diplomacy, ruthlessness and luck - with luck being perhaps the biggest part.

The question is sustainability in long term.
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Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de