Software is Free?
Spend time in any college town and in time, you'll almost certainly hear of a band named "Free Beer". The trick is that when their band name is on the marquis of a local club, passersby see "Free Beer" prominently displayed and go inside, expecting to get a gratis lager but have their hopes dashed when they find only a mediocre band with a catchy name.
Nowadays, we here a lot about "Free Software". To quote the Free Software Foundation, the GNU Project, "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." For their full article, click here.
In the macro-sense, what happens is:
1. Someone becomes disenchanted with the price of a piece of software
2. They write (alone, with a group of friends or as an open-source community) a "free" alternative, usually in their free-time as a hobby
3. The users see that it's a decent substitute for the "pay-for" version
4. Users abandon the "pay-for" version for the "free" version (jeopardizing or destroying the financial viability for the initial "pay-for" supplier company)
5. Users have questions about usage, how to enhance it, etc....
6. They ask the software writer or community for help in getting their needs met
7. As the magnitude of questions and requests increase, it becomes burdensome and "more-than-a-hobby"
8. The person or members of the community begin to charge small amounts for the software so that they can maintain their livelihoods while making support and development a full-time function
9. Big companies adopt the software
10. Big demands is created for people who can develop and support the software
11. The size of this demand creates paid-consultants and developers for the "free software"
12. The demand for more sophisticated developers and support people leads to industry being created around the new "formerly-free" software
13. The price falls into line with the first "pay-for" software
14. Go back to step #1
We've seen this cycle happen multiple times. The two most notable examples: Linux is through this cycle, Firefox is mid-way through this cycle. The outcome is that you end up in the longer-term with the sort of bait-and-switch that was mentioned with the "Band Named Free Beer" scenario earlier in this article.
At Cheetah, we know that software is not truly free. Even if it's created to be free, the longer-term support and product development demands can only prevent it from being free. To that, we do our very best to keep our operating costs low and deliver a very good product (SmartCAT, TurboCAT for Windows) at a very good value. Did you know that we've not increased prices in 20 years since the Cheetah Systems was founded in 1987?
By maintaining our discipline and continually looking at ways to innovate and keep costs low while improving our tech support, training, testing and product development processes, we are able to ensure that we will be a stable supplier for top-notch CAT software and have brilliantly knowledgeable, friendly people here for you for a good long time.
All the best,
Greg L. Richardson
VP of Operations & Director of Marketing
Cheetah International, Inc.
Nowadays, we here a lot about "Free Software". To quote the Free Software Foundation, the GNU Project, "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." For their full article, click here.
In the macro-sense, what happens is:
1. Someone becomes disenchanted with the price of a piece of software
2. They write (alone, with a group of friends or as an open-source community) a "free" alternative, usually in their free-time as a hobby
3. The users see that it's a decent substitute for the "pay-for" version
4. Users abandon the "pay-for" version for the "free" version (jeopardizing or destroying the financial viability for the initial "pay-for" supplier company)
5. Users have questions about usage, how to enhance it, etc....
6. They ask the software writer or community for help in getting their needs met
7. As the magnitude of questions and requests increase, it becomes burdensome and "more-than-a-hobby"
8. The person or members of the community begin to charge small amounts for the software so that they can maintain their livelihoods while making support and development a full-time function
9. Big companies adopt the software
10. Big demands is created for people who can develop and support the software
11. The size of this demand creates paid-consultants and developers for the "free software"
12. The demand for more sophisticated developers and support people leads to industry being created around the new "formerly-free" software
13. The price falls into line with the first "pay-for" software
14. Go back to step #1
We've seen this cycle happen multiple times. The two most notable examples: Linux is through this cycle, Firefox is mid-way through this cycle. The outcome is that you end up in the longer-term with the sort of bait-and-switch that was mentioned with the "Band Named Free Beer" scenario earlier in this article.
At Cheetah, we know that software is not truly free. Even if it's created to be free, the longer-term support and product development demands can only prevent it from being free. To that, we do our very best to keep our operating costs low and deliver a very good product (SmartCAT, TurboCAT for Windows) at a very good value. Did you know that we've not increased prices in 20 years since the Cheetah Systems was founded in 1987?
By maintaining our discipline and continually looking at ways to innovate and keep costs low while improving our tech support, training, testing and product development processes, we are able to ensure that we will be a stable supplier for top-notch CAT software and have brilliantly knowledgeable, friendly people here for you for a good long time.
All the best,
Greg L. Richardson
VP of Operations & Director of Marketing
Cheetah International, Inc.
posted by Cheetah International @ 11:15 AM
1 Comments:
At 12:01 PM,
Mark Burge said…
Linux is not a stand alone product owned by any one company, but exists in many distributions, of which only a couple of enterprise versions are actually not 'free as in beer'
The source code for all open source programs is and will always be freely available to anyone to use, change and redistribute. So this article is actually quite mis leading.
Please look at ubuntu and openoffice for some good examples of how commercially founded products have been donated as open source.
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