Author: Allen Lake
Date: 10:29:54 08/07/02
Go up one level in this thread
On August 07, 2002 at 10:39:32, Uri Blass wrote: >No > >I believe that most of the programmers with freeware program know that their >program is too weak to be commercial. > >People who give freeware programs that are good enough to be sold not only >prevent themselves to earn money but also make it harder for other people to >make money. Maybe the other hassles that go along with turning a hobby into a business outweigh the potential revenue to be earned from making a chess program into a commercial product. Maybe the pre-existing competition in the chess program market discourages some people who could make the leap to commercial status. After all, who's going to buy the product that finished 10th or 12th in the latest computer chess tournament? There's no doubt that giving a product away for free makes it difficult for competitors of that product to make money (for example, Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, in the late 1990's). Don't forget, however, that there is no divine right to profit. >If they want to be generous then it is better if they sell their program and >give the money they earn from their program to poor people. Better for whom? Better for those competitors who have commercial aspirations -- not so good for chess program users. I'm glad that not all authors have the same view of their users that you appear to have. One man's generosity is another man's... Let me give you an example. In the past few months, I've spent some time tinkering with a couple of GPL'd chess-related programs, "scratching some itches" so that those programs would do what I thought they ought to do. By your logic, since I work in the software industry, I shouldn't have given my code changes to those authors for free -- I should have found a way to charge them for my code. After all, I'm a software professional and I found either bugs or features that the original programmers didn't find or implement, so I should have charged them my usual consulting fee for looking at and fixing their code. Instead, since they freely gave me the code to tinker with, I gave them back the fixes/features that I came up with. There were two reasons I did what I did for those two programs -- for the challenge, and for fun. If my code made those two programs more competitive with someone's similar commercial product, hooray! If those commercial products lose sales because the GPL'd products are a better value for the price -- that's how the market works. Just my two cents worth.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.