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by TeMPOraL
4176 days ago
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Well, I disagree. There's a ton of software that is being developed and distributed for free because the authors actually care about solving a problem. Not all software needs to be sold, not all developers do it for money. For many people money is the problem (you need to put time to get it which could be better used to build useful stuff), not the goal. Some developers choose to sell their software, and they have their perfect right to do so. Hard work needs to be compensated, and if someone wants that compensation to be money, then so be it. Just label it in clear terms. Ad-software is not a legitimate earning method, it's robbery. What it tells is that you don't give a damn about neither problem you're pretending to try to solve (otherwise you wouldn't let your app to be polluted with worthless crap) nor your users, who will have to live with malware (which, on global scale, is a huge negative utility in terms of lost productivity and health lost to stress/anger). (I skipped here over the big, expensive software - things like Photoshop, Matlab, etc. That they are result of hard work of people who need to get paid is obvious, and everybody knows that they should buy that software if they needed, and they will receive something valuable in exchange.) |
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I'd go a bit farther: not all software can be sold. Making some extremely niche software fills that niche, but there may be a very small audience for, say, combinatory logic interpreters, or theorem provers. If we as a society demand that every piece of software be sold, and maybe the bulk of the members of the society have a weird idea that the price of something has to reflect the cost of that good plus profit, then a lot of software will never get written, and a lot of ideas won't get tried out, and a lot of niches will go unfilled.