Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

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Re: Fucking Daft

Author:	Joshua Allen
Posted:	8/28/2000; 6:07:20 PM
Topic:	scriptingNews outline for 8/28/2000
Msg #:	20411 (In response to 20408)
Prev/Next:	20410 / 20412

The difference I see in software developed on a consulting basis vs. software developed for wide public consumption is in the embedded financial incentives. If you get paid by the hour by each person you write for, you have an incentive to take a long time and redo work for each customer. On the other hand, if you see your customer as an entire demographic, your financial incentive is to make the software easy to use and cheap. If you think of mass production being the catalyst of the industrial revolution, imagine if the craftsmen had been able to lobby to make Henry Ford's assembly line illegal. They could say "We believe that individually hand-crafting each automobile and doing maintenance on it is the best way to compete in this new economy."

Of course you are right -- it's all the same thing if you work for free. Also I agree that one could see a false either/or from open source vs. commercial software. Sharing code is not a bad thing. But neither is money a bad thing. Money has a wonderful ability to measure contributions in an unbiased manner. That's why when you take the "free" out of the programming equation, software tends to have much broader social impact...

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