At 7:17 AM -0500 10/30/00, Peter D. Junger wrote:
>In the future commodity software, including, of course, operating systems,
>will be free. Other software will be sold or licensed in accordance
>negotiated terms.
I don't know whether this is visionary or just nuts. Why do you think that people are going to compete to give away software? There has always been a sector of the software development community giving away programs (though I think that sector is notably smaller today than it was five years ago), but it was always, for the most part, the province of niche products or 3d party extensions -- one-writer programs. The exceptions migrated from freeware to shareware to pay-me-now-ware. Mozilla became Netscape which ended up suing Microsoft for giving away IE because they couldn't make money giving away Navigator. I'm sure Linux is a great OS, but I don't anybody who's not a computer maven who uses it, and I picture 3-4 versions with different GUIs developed and marketed by folks who are less altruistic than Mr. Torvald.
Maybe I'm missing your point, Peter: do you see people developing substitutes for Windows, Word, Illustrator, etc. out of the goodness of their hearts, or do you envision a different way to make money distributing free applications.
John Noble Received on Mon Oct 30 2000 - 23:42:05 GMT
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