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

On 20/08/2024 08:52, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

On 2024-08-19 21:09, David Brown wrote:
 

Experience shows that commercial software vendors rarely passed the real costs on to the users - they often pass vastly higher charges on to the user for software than it cost to develop the software.  Other times, they might charge very little or nothing because they have other sources of income, such as giving away the main software and charging subscription fees for add-on features.  There are all sorts of models - free and open source software provides different models.  At my company, the software we write is closed source, but we never charge for licenses for it.  Customers either pay for the time used in development, or they pay for it as part of the cost of the electronics boards we make for them.
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If you use, for example, gcc or Linux, you don't pay the costs directly.   But you /do/ pay them indirectly.  The solid majority of development for major free and open source projects is paid work.  Intel and ARM pay developers to work on gcc - every time you buy a device with an Intel or ARM processor in it, you are paying a little towards gcc.  Google pays for Linux development - every time you buy a new pair of shoes, some of what you pay goes to the manufacturer's advertising budget, some of which goes to Google, some of which goes to Linux development, so that Google's servers can use a steadily better quality OS to serve up those adverts.
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It all goes around - there's always money there, somewhere.

 

Just like any other kind of competition, free and open source has been disruptive in many software markets where some companies were used to spending some money on development, then living off that software for years as nearly pure profit.  It has forced other companies to change models - making their software better, or providing better support.  But it hasn't killed the good quality, imaginative and flexible software companies.  In the embedded development world, there are large numbers of compilers available at a range of prices because they offer something that pure gcc does not - support, certification, additional tools, training, libraries, specialised extra features, or whatever.  Other companies exist by taking gcc (or clang) and adding more and charging for it.  These markets were not /killed/ by free and open source compilers - they were /created/ by them.
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And customer companies - successful, well-run ones at least - are still quite happy to pay a lot of money for software if it does a better job than equivalent free software, saving them money in the end.  At my company we have bought compilers when they were better tools for the job than free tools.  But they have to be /better/ - not just more expensive, and they have to be better enough to justify the price. Usually, they are not.
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So no, free and open source development does not "kill quality" or "kill markets".  It is often /better/ quality than commercial alternatives, at least in some ways, and it forces commercial alternatives to improve their quality and cost-effectiveness.  It does not /kill/ markets - it /changes/ them.  It spells the end for some suppliers, and opens up opportunities for new ones, just like progress always does.
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People who complain about how free and open source software has killed their businesses are like saddle-makers sitting about complaining about how the car killed their markets, while their competitors have switched from making saddles to opening car repair shops.

 It is no complain, merely stating an elementary economic fact. If the price does not reflect the costs, there is no market. No market, no competition. No competition, no quality.

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.
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.
Most "elementary economics" is based on the idea of physical production - to make each whotsit, a company buys in parts for a cost $A, uses employee time for a cost $B, and sells it for a price $C.  Profit is then $C - ($A + $B).  You make more money by reducing A or B, or increasing C.  Production scaling is just multiplication.  Competition comes from others making whotsits for lower prices, or with higher worth.
Software development, licensing and sale is /totally/ different.  The cost models are completely different.  Base cost is high, but unit cost is near zero.  Some software (like computer games) is, roughly speaking, make once then sell lots - for other kinds of software, it's a continuous process.  Some is sold, some is effectively rented out.  Some is given away free in order to sell other products (like support deals, or hardware).  The same license can be sold in one situation for 100 times the price of a different situation.

 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.  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.
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.