Anything and Nothing

Well me and Marshall are eventually going to do a podcast
(ariel.homeunix.net/podcast) about this. But I was sitting and thinking
the other day. Ever since I got my PowerBook Ti I have turned it into my
new desktop machine… Right now the only thing that my “old” desktop
machine is used for is basically archiving my e-mail and serving my
music thats it. However, as I start to use OS X more and more I am
discovering that 80% of the software for it is Shareware. This started
me on thinking about this: Linux - Free software that is not always up
to par, with the exception of the few mass projects like
KDE/Mono/GNOME/The kernel. The rest of the software is kinda iffy you
have a few really good programs out there that are supported by a single
developer.
On the other hand you have MS applications which are 90% Commercial.
Most of this software is good but there are some that are just not worth
the money you are asked for it(EasyCD Creator anyone?).
Lastly, you have OS X which is 80%-90% Shareware, what this means that
the price for the software is anywhere from 5$ to 50$. What is
interesting is that almost every single shareware program that I have
demoed is almost “perfect” for whatever function I am needing at the time.
So what does this lead me to believe? Well Free Software (OSS) is good
for the consumer as long as there is a decent sized group of people to
develop it (Firefox, KDE, kernel). But when you look at the rest of the
OSS world and you look at the quality of the software most of the time
you end you having to wait for 3-4 releases before it does what you are
looking for. I believe it is because of the lack of… motivation (aka
money, or just some kind of reward other than “thank you” e-mails coz
those do not pay the bills). Why am I saying this well look at Firefox
most of the lead developers have jobs in corporations (Google for
example) which pay them to do their work on OSS, look at Linus he is
employed by the Linux Labs where he gets paid to work on the kernel.
Now look at Windows where just because of the sheer dominance in the
market most corporations end up spewing out software that is half done,
or working but full of holes. So the user/company ends up paying
luducrus amounts of money on licesnces and what not for software that
although does what they need it doesn’t do it the best way possible.
Finally we get to OS X and Shareware. Here you have single or small
groups of people writing and releasing software for a small price, most
of the time, which you pay only once and then you get any upgrades for
free, again most of the time. However, just about every software
released like that is good from the start you just end up getting more
and more features with more releases as opposed to getting no new
features for 3 releases but getting holes fixed.
Ok so where is this leading? Well I think most of the OSS developers out
there just don’t have the motivation Shareware developers do. What would
be an interesting solution? A Shareware/OSS mix. Something like here is
the source under approved OSS license but here is the already packaged
up and ready to go version for X amount of money. What would this do?
Well it will not clash with the OSS spirit since the project is still
open but the main developer gets fed. Of course this is in no way
bulletproof since the project is OSS what happens when someone
contributes a patch/bug fix/feature? I think a simple solution would be
depending on the contributions you get a % of the profit. Well this and
more once we do the podcast so keep track of
http://ariel.homeunix.net/podcast