S
Steven D'Aprano
-1
That quote confuses the *cost* of duplicating software (which is close
enough to zero) with the *value* put on the software by the market (the
users). We can see that, for example, Ben Finney himself puts quite a lot
of value on software such as emacs. Just recently Ben wrote (paraphrased)
that he valued emacs because although he wasn't a Lisp programmer, other
programmers had already produced many fine emacs tools that let him be a
more productive developer. Now Ben is agreeing with the statement that he
doesn't value software, that he considers emacs and other such tools mere
commodities and is indifferent to which he uses, or even whether he uses
any at all. That's clearly untrue, and I can only imagine it is because
Ben doesn't understand what it means for a product, service or thing to
have no market value. No value is not the same as priceless, and I
imagine Ben would agree that freedom to modify the source code of emacs
is virtually priceless.
Should distribution costs rise (say, because the Australian government's
compulsory web censorship plan "accidentally" block all free software --
it must be warez if it's free, right?) then would it really be
inconceivable that people in Australia who valued emacs over (say)
Microsoft Notepad would be willing to pay for reliable, uncensored copies
of the software?
Plenty of people pay for free software. Some of them pay with money, some
of them pay with development effort, some of them with both. Unless my
memory is playing tricks on me, I believe that Ben himself has purchased
Ubuntu CDs with real money; and if he hasn't, I can assure you that his
employer has.
I can only imagine that what Lawrence was trying to say was something on
the lines of this: open source software reduces the ability of vendors to
extract monopoly rents from software by turning each software application
itself into a commodity. It's not just that there are a thousand
different text editors from a thousand suppliers that Ben could use, but
that there are a thousand suppliers entitled to distribute emacs itself,
and competition between those suppliers ensure that the cost of emacs
approaches the marginal cost of duplication and distribution, which is
essentially zero.
(The corollary of this is that to avoid such commoditization, software
vendors need the government to enforce an artificial monopoly on each
product. That's not necessarily a bad thing, although it often is.)
It's not as snappy as saying that Ben and others like him don't value
software, but it's more accurate.