Software and profits

The most downloaded projects from sourceforge seem to mostly have something to do with music/video and/or the downloading of it. The top 5 has 3 P2P clients (eMule, DC++, BitTorrent), one CD ripper (CDex), and one video editor (VirtualDub).

What's interesting to me is that all of the top 5 seem to run counter to your conclusion. All of them, as far as I can tell, are done out of altruism. They're all hobby projects, done because the authors have use for such tools. None have any kind of corporate sponsorship that I'm aware of.

We're not talking piddly little user bases here, we're talking software with 9 to 34 million downloads from source forge alone, a figure most commercial app vendors would love to have!

So I really think it depends on the app. If it's something that's likely to be useful to the kinds of people who write software (and obviously P2P clients, CD rippers and video editors must fall into that category), then I think you can expect people to make it for the love of it. It's more specialised (and boring) software that's harder to convince people to work on for free.

Comment on Software and profits by James Robertson

Shane

That's not inconsistent with what I said - such projects have very little to do with altruism, and an awful lot to do with self interest...

I'm pretty sure that bittorrent is profitable in some way. anyway, I must protest: incented!!?

I don't see altruism and self interest being mutually exclusive. In fact, I'd say all altruistic acts are motivated by self interest: if we didn't have the self interest to perform the act, we wouldn't do it.

Of course, the actual self interest involved has been described differently by different people. An egoist might say it's because helping others gives the individual satisfaction. A buddhist might say it's the playing out of one's karma in the search for enlightenment. And an open source advocate might say it's scratching one's itches. Whatever you call it, it's still altruism despite also having self interest at heart.

Whether you agree or disagree with the FSF position, I think they've done one very important thing: they've brought the idea that copyright is a tradeoff, rather than a natural right, into the spotlight. Sometimes you need to hear the extreame view from one side to see how far from your starting point you've come.

Marginal costs of production? Only from a technological point of view. If I spend one year of my life writing a book, then sure, making a PDF file of it and putting it on a website for distribution will not constitute a big cost factor. But who is going to give that year of my life back to me? (And maybe a few more years in addition, so I can write more books?) Just because distributing my book, once it IS produced, can be done at negligible cost, technologically, does that mean it is worthless? Disqualifying intellectual property as a concept on the grounds that it is misused by artificially upheld monopolistic organizations is not the answer to this question. Society will have to install a fair and profitable marketplace for intellectual goods, but not abolish it entirely.

~winterblue~

All these assume we are all playing Monopoly. In particular, we are reaching a point in which as we play Monopoly there are fewer and fewer winners, and far worse consequences for the losers. Where did "we do something because we enjoy it" end? There are other games to play.

Some people might find it interesting to read this article with quite different conclusions, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

Last time I checked, bread and butter gives you satisfaction, but certainly do not gurantee motivation.

There is a gulf between being driven (motivated) to something and just staying alive or keeping status quo.

Comment on Software and profits by James Robertson

Bread and Butter guarantee the ability to code another day :)

The game is called "Live And Enjoy As Long As You Can", but, well, one might consider this to be a variant of Monopoly.