More about evil old Capitalism

Personal computing and capitalism

Published on February 14, 2005 By Draginol In Industry

In my last article, I talked about how there is a sub-set of people on-line who have a real problem with the concept of capitalism. That is, people intentionally making products and services that are designed to make money for the creator of those products or services.

But while capitalism may be tolerated by those people, some are pushed over the edge over the concept of charging money for intellectual property (such as software). While one can understand having to pay for food or cars or other tangible things, the idea of having to pay for something that has no physical form and hence no production cost is anathema to some.

The result is that a small but vocal minority of people will go out and harass those who create commercial software.

The example I gave was a the announcement of a program called Multiplicity. It enables users to take multiple computers, each with its own monitor(s) and combine them together into a single unit that is controlled by a single keyboard and mouse. At first, we saw people come on and insist it was no different than some freeware program that's available. And indeed, on paper there are freeware programs that are similar to Multiplicity. But in a similar vein, there are similar programs, on paper, to WindowBlinds such as CustomEyes. Such freeware, open source programs tend to be more technology demo than something you would use.

The response I got from people in that thread was very interesting. I wasn't aware that there were people who were really and truly insistent that commercial software and freeware/open source are generally equivalent in quality even though any reasonably experience software user knows that isn't the case.

Commercial software is almost always better than freeware. Not because commercial developers are better programmers but because the commercial developer has a stronger incentive to keep enhancing, fixing, tweaking, polishing the program than the freeware developer. The typical freeware developer is making something largely for themselves that they later decide to share with others. By contrast, the commercial software developer is making something they hope others will pay for. Big difference.

There are countless examples of freeware that is better than commercial offerings (Look how good Firefox is). But that's not the norm.

Personally, I use freeware when I can because I'm cheap. But if it's something that matters, I'm going to go with whatever the best and that normally means having to pay for it.

But getting back to the hatred of capitalism, once the argument over freeware vs. commercial in terms of software quality was simmering I also received private messages from ant-capitalists that essentially said "Look, you've already got Stardock and WinCustomize to post your spam on, why do you have to post your spam on Neowin's software news?" Which was an intriguing unintentional admission.

The Neowin.net software news section is designed for announcements of software news (I should know, I'm a news moderator there). It doesn't discriminate on the type of software. It can be free. It can be commercial. It doesn't matter. But it was very telling that multiple people objected to the announcement of commercial software. If Multiplicity was a freeware program, no doubt they'd been fine. Their hope, from experience, is to try to harass/shame commercial developers to go away.

Of course, this is nothing new. I've been dealing with this phenomenon for years. During the dot-com extremes and the height of the open source hype such people were much more numerous and more vocal as we got regular demands for us to make our software open source.

But at the end of the day, software that is complicated and hard to develop, particularly if the quality of the software has to do with the execution of it, needs to be developed by people who are paid to do it. And that money has to come from somewhere. WindowBlinds dominates the GUI skinning world because it has been continuously developed for 8 years now. If it were freeware, it would have died off long ago, I can assure you of that.

That is why capitalism is a force for good -- it provides an incentive for people to do things they would rather not do in order to make the product or service better. And that improvement benefits the user and provides resources to do other things that benefit users (such as pay for a skin site).

Comments (Page 2)

jfp3

on Feb 15, 2005

..show me a collectively owned car, and I'll show you a car who's tires need air, interior needs a vaccuming, and oil needs changing. Let me put this another way. Show me a Taxi company that buys it's own fleet and leases them out by the week, and another that hires owner/drivers who maintain their own vehicles. The private ownership route wins in all ways hands down. Ownership usually leads to caring about condition, quality and waste.

And I'll bet not one "socialist" on this thread would willingly offer to spend a year in North Korea. Any who volunteer for it, I will buy you a ticket. No joke. (And I'll even provide you your first weeks boxed lunches)...

Madine

on Feb 15, 2005

Most good freeware programs have a dedicated development team and some source of revenue.

Many freeware programs are something that 1 or 2 people wrote in their free time and are fixed/updated when they feel like it. There's nothing wrong with that, but the software won't be as good as commercial quality.

paxx

on Feb 15, 2005

I completely agree that usually, comercial software are better, just like generally, expensive software are better than cheap ones. You get what you paid for, often. But my point is that sometimes is "better" realy better? I mean, how many people actually NEED MS Word. Of course it's better than other free alternatives. But quite often, the free alternative, while it doesn't have as many options, is really good enough.

on Feb 16, 2005

I agree about freeware. XXCalc is great, but I'm the only developer so it was slow progress for me to get it to be workable.

wombatDK

on Feb 17, 2005

It's getting tiresome. Use whatever you want. There's no reason to slam people for shelling out hard earned cash for commercial software. Neither is there a reason for slamming people who use free software. There's a good reason for using either.

Sooo... lets get stupid and mix capitalism and socialism with software development (totally braindead comparison).

Oh btw, I was born in a country that has social capitalism as its chosen mode of operation. Works just fine. Has advantages too... socialized medication (top notch, even), unemployment benefits, yada yada. The big drawback? If you're rich, you pay for the ones that are poor.

Compare this to socialism: In theory it could work I guess - IF people were motivated to work for works sake. Personally, I've yet to meet more than the occasional individual who does that. The majority of people on this planet are lazy slobs though.

Oh now lets have a look at pure capitalism: I guess in theory it could work too - except that countries that get close to that theory have a fascinating tendency to make rich people richer and poor people poorer. I suppose the poor deserve it though, after all money is value. Poor people are at best the dirt on the road.

I find it fascinating that people who live in certain countries believe socialism is inherently bad. On the other hand, people from certain other countries believe capitalism is bad.

Then again, I'm a cynic and as such not to be taken seriously.

Jacob Weinman

on Mar 04, 2005

I believe in a real market capitalism. One where buyers and sellers are both operating in their own self-interest. One where the sellers are the people who entire produce or import what they are selling.
That is the definition of capitalism in most economic texts dating back to Adam Smith.
But today we have a vastly different setup. The sellers are run by people who benefit only from the price of the shares today. And if closing a profitable business is better for the share price, then to hell with the workers who worked to produce profitable quality products and to those who invested in the shares hoping to get a better return than buying Government Bonds or annuities. They better jump ship and sell their shares quickly or they will end up with worthless shares. And the biggest money goes to those who know when to jump or the brokers, who leave their gullible clients and the pension funds still on board the sinking ship.

So let's try real capitalism. It works at every farmer's market, and shareware is real capitalism. Most commercial software is filled with so many problems, that a product recall is necessary. Just look at the daily updates from Micro-hard to fix problems that would get every car maker sued.

Underdog45

on Mar 04, 2005

Capitalism works best when there is lots of choices and competition. That way, greedy people inadvertently make society better. In order to compete, the product/service being produced must be made to be better than everyone else's. With everyone trying to get better to increase sales and enrich themselves, the overall products and services being made by the greedy capitalist pigs are constantly increasing in quality due to market pressures thereby helping out society as a whole. That's Capitalism 101, and that's why free trade (properly regulated to keep monopolies from forming) is the solution to poverty much of the world's economic ills

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