At the Cato conference this week, one of the participants made the familiar comment that the open source business model is to give away the software and sell the surrounding services. And I had a familiar reaction -- I, and most other consumers, don't want to buy any services; I want software to work immediately and without input from expensive humanware.

Assume Microsoft charges a computer manufacturer $70 for Windows, a figure I heard recently in Korea. If the computer life is 3 years, that is about $23 per year. If I value my time at $50 an hour (cheap), then half an hour of screwing around eats up the equivalent of my annual cost of Windows. If I have to call in an expert at, say, $100 an hour, it takes 15 mnutes of services to eat up $23, not counting the downtime and general inconvenience.

So tell me again just why it is that these people would do me a favor by forcing me into a system in which I can't buy software and must consequently get involved in this kind of effort. I keep forgetting.

There is nothing wrong with open source software as a cooperative effort among programmers or as a strategy by hardware and services vendors, but the ethical argument that services can be sold but software must be free is absolute gibberish. Software and services are both complements and substitutes, and the proper mix should be left to the market, as enabled by property rights, of course.

posted by James DeLong @ 10:12 AM | Software

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