Seth Godin put up a thought-provoking post on Saturday titled On paying for software. This is another in a string of industry thinkers looking at the Microsoft acquisition of Github and trying to understand the potential impact. It’s a good moment to reflect on what software (and free) means to various industries.
Seth makes the point, correctly, that everything has a cost to create. But he also lays out the economic argument that the cost spread over essentially millions of users is often negligible (or at least seen by users as negligible). It’s the right argument to make for the why software needs an up-front cost.
The missing piece to so many of these discussions is what happens to software over time. Open source software that isn’t supported by a big software company often has issues getting and maintaining a team to build and maintain a system. Software degrades over time because it must interact with other systems. As those systems change, the interaction usually becomes less secure because the software didn’t think through angles and alleys that didn’t exist at the time.
Paying for software means that you are more likely to have someone paying attention to it over time. If you need a tool precisely once, the on-going cost doesn’t matter. But if you need something to support you over time, either someone else is maintaining it or you are. If you aren’t paying for it, you are the one maintaining it whether you realize it or not.