This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Software and profits Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Scoble makes a point that I've made here many, many times - making software is expensive, and it has to be paid for somehow. There are a few people who don't seem to get this - apparently, the notion of having to pay bills never occurs to them. Now, this really doesn't have anything specifically to do with Closed Source vs. Open Source; you can make money off of either model. Here's what Scoble had to say:

Eben Moglen asks an interesting question: "If I can provide to everyone all goods of intellectual value or beauty, for the same price that I can provide the first copy of those works to anyone, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything?"

Because humans are incented to do more when there's motivation, that's why.

Society learns this over and over and over and over. Communism vs. Capitalism. In every instance, humans do better when the people who do more for society are rewarded.

Which is exactly correct. People will only do so much (and in most cases, that's not a lot) out of altruism. Take BottomFeeder, for instance. Sure, it's freely available, and it'll stay that way. However, my ability to work on it is directly related to it's connection to my job (promoting Smalltalk in general, and Cincom Smalltalk in particular). Don't believe me? Go look at SourceForge - how many of those projects are active? Look at the big, successful open source projects - they all have funding (either direct or indirect). Non-trivial software projects are just too hard to be sustained by any model that doesn't involve some kind of funding.

So to get back to the question Scoble answered - if you provide a good freely, it's value will end up approaching zero. If there's no compensation, no one will feel any compulsion to support or create that good. Ultimately, we all have to eat :)