On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 00:54 -0700, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
Besides, I have a personal vested interest to keep Software Engineering a paying profession for quite some time, so helping them refine a good business model to keep that alive is a win-win for most people.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the entire shrinkwrap software industry could curl up and die tomorrow and 90% of software engineers would still have jobs.
In contrast to the usual shrinkwrap model of "We will write this software for free[1], and try to subsidize the effort after-the-fact through licensing fees[2]," the business model for the remaining 90% of the industry is, "We are paid directly for the work of {writing,customizing} software to perform [needed function]."
While the latter does include contractors, most such software engineers are not; they work for companies in various industries, writing software for in-house use.
For them, unlike the shrinkwrap industry, Free Software is clearly an asset.
"Ah," you ask, "but what about specialized industries? Surely there's not enough of a pool of Free Software developers with specialized knowledge out there to produce the software they need? Surely we need the proprietary model to fund the production of that sort of thing?"
What would happen, in the absence of a proprietary vendor to supply specialized software, is that the companies in the particular specialized industry would get together, form a consortium, and pool their efforts to get the needed software written. The short-term costs would be a little higher, but there is a long-term economic advantage from the absence of ongoing licensing fees (which in most specialized industries tend to be inordinately high[3]).
I know they would do that, incidentally, because it's what happens today. Not all industries have a proprietary vendor ready to supply them. However, even when they do, those sorts of efforts go into providing interchange standards and tools for migrating data between the various proprietary vendor silos (which the vendors have comparatively little interest in providing -- until the consortium develops the standard/tools, and the vendors forced to support them due to customer demand).
If you think that's a good thing, economically, I'd suggest reading up on the Broken Window Fallacy.
Now, I realize Xara is trying to do something different[4], and that in Xara's case they can also benefit from the artificial market created by Pantone's IP licensing, but whether they succeed or they fail, programmers are still going to be eating.
-mental
[1] Sure, the individual programmers get paid right away (most of the time). But the company doesn't.
[2] Of course, the programmers don't normally get to share directly in the licensing revenue either.
[3] Anecdotal extreme example: at one company I worked for, we were paying seven figures/yr for what was essentially a steaming pile of ASP scripts on top of an MS Access database (though it had later been ported to MSSQL). It was developed, apparently, by a summer student who had never really learned about databases or a lot of other important things. No normalization. No transactions. No consideration of concurrency. Successful installation took a team of two engineers from the vendor three days. I'm not going to say it was overpriced, because clearly the demand was there, but ... man ...
I think an industry consortium could have done just a wee bit better, cheaper.
[4] In fact, it's entirely possible that this Xara-Inkscape situation may end up becoming an industry consortium sort of thing. A lot of professional design places have programmers on staff these days for web work, and Xara is in a better position to tap into this than Inkscape is alone. They're certainly in a position to provide the things that the big vendors, "Macrobe", and Microsoft, won't.