Pricing a Software Product 259
prostoalex writes "Eric Sink from SourceGear shares his experience on software pricing. Whether you're developing open-source or proprietary software, the money has to come into the business in some form, and the article suggests several strategies as well as the pitfalls for managing software pricing. Sink claims it's tough to compete on price, dangerous to run seasonal promotions and almost impossible to avoid criticism on being over-priced."
better colors (Score:4, Informative)
Re:better colors (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:better colors (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:better colors (Score:3, Insightful)
We can but hope, but it didn't do any good for the games section colour scheme...
Re:better colors (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, my other account is a subscriber. But considering that when I posted a complaint about it both the IP's I post from (home and work) were banned from posting anything and my karma quickly going from the good/excellent threshold to terrible, I'd say that it doesn't carry any extra weight at all. I had been a constant subscriber since subscription had become available too.
Thank goodness for proxies, I guess.
Re:better colors (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's unheard of for the editors to pay attention to anything the readers say, but this really has to change. Some of the other sections may have hideous color schemes but this one is simply unreadable. Days later, I still manually change the URL for every story posted in IT.
Re:better colors (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:better colors (Score:5, Funny)
Looka These Hyar Charts (Score:5, Insightful)
Volume Pricing has its snag in how you handle customer Support. I didn't see that addressed (other than lightly under Tech Support), the higher the volume of sales the more need for customer support. Only so much can be down with a website FAQ. (Personally, I'm wary of products which don't come with printed manuals or a pdf with only a light treatment of the subject matter, back in the day manuals were your saviours, now they're some kind of afterthought that vendors seem uninterested in putting effort into.)
With inexpensive stuff you may lose all your profit on customer support, with pricing of support and/or a higher price nd lower volume there's less need for a large customer support team, or it grows as needed.
Granted, I've worked for people whe shelled big really big zorkmids on stuff and when it turned out to be crap, it wasn't the vendor to blame but headcount.
There's some discomforting truth to many of those Dilbert strips.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Software pricing simplified (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, if you are selling to a wider audience, the software can be cheaper. This is why niche software like AutoCAD is so expensive.
Re:Software pricing simplified (Score:2, Insightful)
It's just that simple...
Re:Software pricing simplified (Score:2)
Re:Looka These Hyar Charts (Score:4, Insightful)
and back in the day, the product they came with was sold at a very high price. Now, the product does much more in less time, is widely known and used, and is sold for less than "back in the day", because otherwise customers will go to a competitor. Even if products do come with a manual, customers won't read it and they will still expect you to help them. Manuals have to be translated in every language your customers might speak. In short, making good manuals means spending a lot of money on something utterly unrewarding.
Re:Read the docs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Still got complaints that the manual was too confusing.
So, I got an idea. In the release of my next project, I included a sentence in the docs: "The first person to bring this sentenece to my attention will get a $1 reward." I put a dollar in my desk drawer and circul
heh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:heh (Score:5, Insightful)
"So what is the right price range?
This question is the point where most small ISVs will wimp out. "We don't have the Microsoft name." "Our product is less mature." "We feel inferior, so obviously our price has to be lower than theirs."
Bzzzt! Wrong answer. The right answer is: "A lot more than $229."
Basically, Sink is telling ISVs to grow a backbone and realize that the first step isn't competing with Microsoft on price (mostly for the reason you're talking about, MS can just drop the price and thus drop the usefulness of your software) but finding the area in which their product is SUPERIOR to Access and leveraging that.
It's good advice. Because by doing this, you encourage people to move away from Access while at the same time increasing itnerest in your product.
We have a local car dealer who did a commercial claiming that the Hyundai luxury sedan looks "just like" the Jaguar only it costs much less. Needless to say, we laugh our ass off at that commercial. A Hyundai is not a Jaguar only cheaper...it's a Hyundai attempting to LOOK like a Jaguar. Too many low-cost programs suffer from trying to look like a Jaguar, when what they really need to do is analyze what it is about the Jaguar that makes it attractive and what can be gleamed from that and added to that to approach the market from a different direction.
Our company writes software for a saturated niche, but does alright because we look at things from a different perspective. Rather than just allowing our customers to enter and store data with a weak search engine, we allow them to enter it quickly, search it powerfully and associate it meaningfully. Our price is higher for that reason -- and yet we have more customers.
Re:heh - Nice pitch (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice elevator pitch, and I'm not being saracstic. It's rare to find such a good and brief expression of what a product does and why it's the one you should use.
Re:heh - Nice pitch (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:heh (Score:2, Interesting)
As is he competes with Source Safe, CVS, Subversion, PVCS, and lots of others.
Hard to call that a monopoly. Heck, Microsoft doesn't even have a monopoly in that space.
Re:heh (Score:4, Insightful)
You completely misunderstood the graph.
#1 The graph is not of a bell curve. It's most likely a parabola.
#2 The graph is of revenue as a function of price, not as demand as a function of price.
#3 If demand were inelastic as you say, Microsoft would be charging $1,000 or $10,000 or $100,000 for their OS.
I think it's more likely that their software is priced to maintain their monopoly.
Value for service (Score:5, Interesting)
Supply-side pricing??? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I want to know is, whatever happened to supply-side pricing. You know, figuring out your cost to supply, and charging a reasonable markup based on that?
It's because of this that companies have to create artificial market distinctions, and why there is the prevalance of after-market modification. (Things like overclocking.)
I know it's a bit of an anti-establishment thought, but I'm not sure demand-side pricing is ethical. The whole idea of trying to take your customers for everything you can sounds so much colder when you look at it from their side.
And on taop of that, if you're a publicly owned company, not doing so might be considered criminal...
Re:Supply-side pricing??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there is a fundamental problem with supply side pricing in the modern factory driven environment. How do you predict how many copies you're going to sell, and thus manufacture?
If you can produce 3 million copies at $2 each and sell at $3 to make back all your money and then some, vs 3,000 copies at $4 each but need to sell at $999 to make back all your money, what do you do?
Realistically you expect to sell less, and charge slightly more, like $2,000, because it only costs you $12,000 to manufacture, vs $6 million to manufacture. Supply side is a great idea, but only if you can perfectly predict how much demand there will be. Of course there are exceptions, but realistically demand-side pricing seems to work slightly better on the average.
This said from someone who's produced several hundred DVDs and sold at $20 or so each, rather than several thousand at $6 each.
Re:Supply-side pricing??? (Score:2)
Of course that's bogus. You have to understand the market (and your product!), well enough to know how many you might sell. Selling hot dogs at a football game? Well, you can look at how many sold at the last 100 football games in the same stadium... If that info is not available, you plan for the worst case, which might be 2 hot dogs for every ticket sold... That's pretty simplistic, but you get the idea.
I should add,
Re:Supply-side pricing??? (Score:2)
Re:Supply-side pricing??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider a great example: Linux. Linux is a great OS, and it doesn't need to cost you a cent to get it running. That sounds too good to be true -- and it is. There are going to be costs to that gratis Linux -- no tech support, RTFM slaps from the mailing lists, slow turnaround if you're stumped, more complicat
Re:Supply-side pricing??? (Score:3, Insightful)
You aren't taking them for everything you can. You're selling at a price, and it's up to them whether they want to pay it or not. Charge them what they are willing to pay, not more. Some people will complain, but as the author says, some people will always complain.
There's nothing unethical about making money. Making money in a free market is the best proof you could ask for th
Re:Supply-side pricing??? (Score:4, Insightful)
For most products, $X+$Y is $Z on a per-piece basis, so I've got a good baseline for my pricing. If I add 10 or 20% to the widget production costs for R&D&S, then drop 30% for my profit, and double that to get the MSRP, it's fairly straight forward.
For service industries, people are the cost, and its not too hard to determine how much to charge. If you charge by the hour (as many service contracts do), you take your hourly rate, factor it by your G&A and Overhead, add your 30% profit, and bill the client.
For software, your R&D and support outweigh your production costs by an order of magnitude or more. Do you price it at $10 and hope everyone buys a copy, or worry that you'll only sell a few copies to well-heeled clients and mark it up to $10,000? MS has elimiated the support problem by not providing any free support. Of course, that reduces the incentive to get it right the first time, too.
Re:Supply-side pricing??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's take an analogy. I have a valuable rare coin worth $1,000. It is taking up space in my house, and I simply found it lying around.
You are a coin collector. Not only do you know it is worth $1,000 on the open market, but you have a particular affinity for it. You would easily pay $2,000 to get your hands on it.
So, if I sell it for $1, are you ripping me off? If I sell it to you for $2,000 (it cost me nothing), am I ripping you off?
You might be tempted to refer to the "market" as the fair price. The market price is nothing more than a value at which you are pretty sure to find a buyer. Higher than that price, you will have to spend time seeking a buyer who places greater than normal value on the thing. Lower than that price and you are basically cheating yourself.
The beauty of capitalism is that it recognizes the basic fact that every person values things uniquely. When we engage in a transaction, we are both more wealthy... even with demand-side pricing. You will never pay more for something than it is worth to you. Anything you pay less means you are wealthier.
Let's take that coin. To you, it is worth $2,000. I sell it to you for $1,500 (above the market value). Before the transaction, you had $1,500 that was worth exactly $1,500 to you. After the transaction, you are down the $1,500. But now you have a coin that is worth $2,000 to you!
As for me, I had a coin that was basically worth nothing to me without knowledge of the market (or worth $1,000 with knowledge of the market). After the transaction, I have $1,500 in cash! BOTH OF US make a profit.
Another flaw in your question is that costs are easy to quantify. In fact, in software development, they are hard to quantify. How much, exactly, does a download of Photoshop from the Adobe web site cost Adobe?
Re:Supply-side pricing??? (Score:2)
Supply side pricing works if every and any company in the business is guaranteed to be profitable. But if there is a downside risk, you need an offsetting upside potential to get suppliers to enter the business. e.g. if 90% of software startups go bankrupt, then you need better than 10:1 payoff odds for any seed investing in the business to be a decent gamble. Supply side pricing rarely offers those odds outside of (mis)managed economies.
Ethics of Supply-side pricing (Score:2)
And the whole idea of trying to take your suppliers for everything by demanding the lowest possible price is pretty cold (just ask the suppliers to Wal-Mart or Dell).
Neither supply-side nor demand-side pricing is wholly ethical - it depends on your perspective. If I find som
Ask the customers! (Score:4, Interesting)
It was then a simple matter in Excel to figure out how to maximize our income, at what price point did we make the most money. It looked pretty much like the first chart in the article.
Then management ignores and sets a price accordingly!
Re:Ask the customers! (Score:3, Insightful)
I really like the common sense straightforwdness of that idea.
do you think they were being truthful?
(not a rhetorical question)
from a game theory kind of view, giving away that kind of information is like giving away money.
like if are going to buy a car, I've read about this method of price negotiaion and maybe one day I'll have the balls to try it:
You tell the salesman that you are both going to write down a number on a piece of paper. You are going to write down the absolut
Re:Ask the customers! (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I do. The Macintosh market is a very unusual one. Yes, the ISVs are out to make a buck, but we generally have a good relationship with the customers. As a good example, to raise a bulk of the seed money for MacSpeech we sold T-Shirts. They were $100 EACH. Each was signed and numbered, came with free product if we ever shipped (we did) and lifetime wholesale pricing on all future products. Obviously, I can tell how many we sold, but lets just say it was a lot
Re:Ask the customers! (Score:2)
In other words... (Score:4, Interesting)
Pricing software is more complex than my human brain can handle. There's a stunning conclusion.
Seriously, though, he makes a lot of very good points cheif of which is asking "how much is too much?" The author also makes a good point about not selling your product for much less than its actual worth. I'm more than happy to pay a premium on a product if I think it's valuable to what I do and it has a distinct advantage over competing solutions. (Case in point, I donated $100 for Trillian before Pro was released. Why? Because I used it every day and it was much better than any of the individual IM clients.)
It's hard to really draw a line in the sand about pricing, though. I think that's the greater point to be made.
Scary (Score:2)
If you get $100 of use out of an IM client, I'm going to have to introduce you to this concept I like to call "outside."
News flash (Score:2)
to summarize...... (Score:3, Interesting)
the higher you charge for your application, the better it will be 'perceived' in the user community.
Re:to summarize...... (Score:2)
It's very difficult to raise your price.
Your pricing should reflect your target consumer (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed! (Score:2)
I've spent $100 on movie making software and $50 on DVD authoring programs, and their power-price ratio is outstanding.
Imagine if you're making $60k a year off Photoshop and Illustrator. $2,000 for the software is chump change. Same for Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Motion, Shake, and any really powerful authoring software.
Photoshop is $600, where Photoshop Elements is $60. If you need the $600, you will gladly pay it, especially
Re:Your pricing should reflect your target consume (Score:2)
If I can make 60k a year, and I throw away half on G&A and overhead, I've got $30k left. Sure, $600 for PS looks like a bargain, but it's probably not the only package you use.
As an engineer, here's a "complete" suite of programs I'm likely to use: AutoCAD ($4000), AutoCAD extensions ($1000 total), a FEM program ($8000), a wood design program ($1200), a steel design program ($5000), a foundations/general design program ($1000), and a ge
Im gonna be rich (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm, competition? No competition! You can find some software books that show you how to make your OWN Hello World, but who has time for that?
Some of those books cost 100 Dollars or more... So that I dont look like an "underdog" im gonna charge $250 dollars. Even better, I could convert Hello World, into Hello World for Workgroups, change the font to something a little more professional, and sell it for $325 plus maintenance and security fees.
arts and crafts?? (Score:2, Funny)
Eric Sink
Software Craftsman
Craftsman?? Damned, Eric must've picked up one of those "Spam degrees".
One way to avoid having to price software... (Score:2)
Re:One way to avoid having to price software... (Score:2)
Re: Pricing a Software Product (Score:2)
Why not just *ask* potential customers? (Score:5, Insightful)
For the average Joe: $20 or under will get impulse buys ("Not that much if it ends up sucking"); over $50 means they'll only buy it if they already know they want it; Over $250 will only get those who really need it and have done some decent research into alternatives. Over $1000 means you can guarantee that everyone will pirate it without even feeling bad ("At that price, I didn't count as a potential customer anyway").
For teens and older kids, drop those to $5, $20, $50 (yes, the average price of a game) and $100, respectively.
For business customers, the scene changes a bit. A very small business may behave like a somewhat more well-to-do average Joe. Once layers of accountability start appearing, though, the low and high categories vanish - No impulse buys, and no piracy. For that reason, as the business gets bigger, the potential price does as well, almost without limit. Keep in mind that the higher the price, the fewer your potential customer base, though.
Re:Why not just *ask* potential customers? (Score:2)
Over $1000 means you can guarantee that everyone will pirate it without even feeling bad ("At that price, I didn't count as a potential customer anyway").
This is pretty much nonsense coming from someone with no experience in corperate purchasing. Have you ever tried to buy a license for a deploymenty of HP OpenView products for example?
Large companies will pay multiple thousands of dollars for software (and I mean *1* license, not many licenses). As long as your product is good and does what it says it
Re:Why not just *ask* potential customers? (Score:3, Insightful)
In a fair world... (Score:3, Insightful)
Odd world where Linux is free and Windows is expensive, eh?
Ahhh.. (Score:2, Funny)
Reputation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reputation (Score:2)
Could have fooled me- my Access 2002 application under XP is the most unstable application that I support. Other than that, I agree.
Re:Reputation (Score:2)
Re:Reputation (Score:4, Interesting)
Scenerio One:
PHB "I'd like to buy a new database with five licenses for $699. It will help our productivity incrase and reduce crashes"
CEO "What about retraining?"
PHB "For all six users, $5,000, including downtime"
Scenereo Two:
PHB "I'd like to buy a new database with five lecenses for $18,500. It will help our productivity incrase and reduce crashes"
CEO "What about retraining?"
PHB "For all six users, $5,000, including downtime"
Given the two options, most CEOs (who know even less about IT than PHBs) will question the investment of $5,000 in training for a $700 product. For $700, how good can it be? But $18,500 for the licenses seems about in line with $5000 in training. Its all psychology.
Oddly enough, there's a program I want which has a pricing scheme that just doens't sit well with me. It's $1200 for the first license, and five licenses are $1995. As a small shop, I see that as an $800 "litte guy" surcharge, so I've not bought it. I have a (free) vendor sponsored copy that's old and I'd like to upgrade, but not for that kind of money. It's a nice program, but not that nice.
How about pricing for real people? (Score:2, Interesting)
Psychology (humans are fucking insane) (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many tales to tell about this debacle (I think the vendor has long since cancelled or put it on maintenance mode) - but there was a point where we raised our price from $250/server to $5000/server, and the ONLY change in the product was a name change. No new features were added. Hell, we didn't even update the GUI. Saled jumped 20% that quarter. (unfortunately it was not to be sustained).
The reasoning was, the Market didn't take us seriously at $250/server because all of our competitors were priced in the $5000/server range.
My favorite "software pricing" story (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Get a monopoly in two important products, e.g., Office and Windows. Charge 80% margins on those products.
Use those huge profits to give away or nearly give away everything else.
Pricing (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole scheme is repeated while increasing the good text file quote by 100. When the donation link reaches $20, I hire some people from India, China, or Glxbltistan (via MSN messenger) to do some more serious marketing and probably maintain some parts of my product code or maybe add plugins for it which I can sell for $15.
Pricing depends on a lot of things (Score:3, Insightful)
If your goal is to maximize profit, that's one thing.
If your goal is to maximize distribution, that's another game altogether.
If your goal is to penetrate a particular niche market but you want the headaches of supporting customers outside that niche, that's another altogether.
If I want mass distribution and can afford to do so, I'll sell it for under $20 or give it away.
If I want niche distribution, I'll research my niche and price accordingly.
If I want to maximize profit, I'll look at the overall market and price where I think I can meet that goal.
There's more to sales than price though. There's your company's reputation, and of course marketing, marketing, and more marketing. But not the overly annoying kind, that typically backfires.
MyEclipse vs. Eclipse vs. Visual Studio (Score:3, Interesting)
and sales of something like Eclipse vs. VisualStudio. Then if you throw MyEclipse [myeclipseide.com] into the mix and see how they do vs. Eclipse. MyEclipse costs about $30 and I have had no problems getting that approved from any company I've contracted for. They've even been so impressed they dropped their other IDEs and moved most of the developers over. Is $30 the right price for an IDE? Is free? Eclipse, as great as it is, can be a bit of a pain to integrate the various plugins you need to do real development. I have no problem paying $30 for that. I even bought my own copy to use at home because I like it so much.
On the flip side you have Visual Studio [microsoft.com]. That seems a bit much for an IDE. Luckily, the company I work for is also MSDN, so it isn't that much for me to get it. If I went into a company and told them I needed a copy of Visual Studio and it would cost them about $1500, I think some might not be too happy. Heck, I could probably get some places to drop MS for Java on server side development based on that cost differential alone.
It seems like the same thing is starting to happen on the Office front now--Star is cheap and Open is free and places are just starting to realize that maybe this is exactly how MS sets prices. It can't compete on cost so it ups the price to make people think it is better. Funny, but I think more and more CIO/CFOs are starting to see this.
Re:MyEclipse vs. Eclipse vs. Visual Studio (Score:3, Insightful)
Joel Spolsky's view (Score:4, Informative)
Duh! (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't rocket science, people. If your total revenue drops when you raise/lower your price, then lower/raise your price. Do a bit of market research to narrow in on the correct price. If sales don't work, don't have sales.
Software is a product just like any other, so don't go throwing our all of your sales and marketing knowledge because your not selling forks and spoons. Some of the details will be different, but most of it will be the same. If your product is Open Source, you're probably going to have to sell it at a low price. If it's proprietary software for a niche market with no competition then you can charge a lot more.
Software Pricing (Score:2)
Thus we were able to price the software based on savings and actual value and we offered promotions but never altered the price.
This seemed to work well.
Pricing should change as product ages. (Score:2)
This is a very naive approach (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect most companies will benefit the most in long term by selling the basic version of their product well below the top of bell curve to still make some profit while protecting their market share. And it's normal for previously unknown companies to lose money by giving away stuff for a couple of years to establish their reputation.
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2, Insightful)
This should become interesting as Free software matures and becomes viable products for the common man (please dont flame on "there already viable")
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2, Interesting)
Then you should open source the product so that additional help can be gathered. If the product is so very popular, plenty of people will be more than willing to work on it for free, even if it means your company benefits, so long as features and fixes they want end up in the software.
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to make money on GOOD software... software that actually empowers people to be self-sufficient, you need to charge for the software.
One other note. It takes vastly different mind sets to develop in a product environment than in a consulting environment. Your best product developers are going to be people you would never throw in front of a client.
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2)
Tech courses are.
If your software is for servers, you can sell pre-installed servers, and skip the cost of making an installer-for-dummies, that you will need to support, and might have its own compatibility requirements. That money can be spent on making better software, or better manager apps, if it's intended for the server market.
Small apps can be supported by selling CDs, T-Shirts, like the Mozilla Foundation, web adds, phone support.
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:3, Interesting)
Some one really ought to tel
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2)
Personally, I'm going to have
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And then there is the rest of the world..... (Score:2)
You see- I'm also an isolationist- I think none of those programs should be available outside of the United States to begin with- and we damn well better not be going outside of the United States for programming those applications either!
You can be guaranteed to find the latest big release on sale round the corner from me in Brazil for a buck fifty & som
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2)
As to your comment about MSDN, perhaps you have forgotten that some of the higher priced versions come with a full suite of developer tools, that's the reason I subscribe and that's how I get the tools I use to create software for Windows. (Why anybody would do it the other way is beyond me; Visual Studio Archetect costs $1700 anyway, so you might as well ge
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee [apache.org], I [gnu.org] can't [kernel.org] think [postgresql.org] of [perl.org] anyone [python.org] who [cons.org] would [haskell.org] develop [openoffice.org] software [sun.com] without [mozilla.org] getting [isc.org] paid [freebsd.org] for [w3c.org] it [ocaml.org]...
But seriously, there are several reasons people would write software whose price is 0:
There are lots of motivations for people's actions besides money.
Reread the grandparent post: (Score:2)
For example: People want to get a job as a programmer so they write a software package to prove they aren't total code monkeys doesn't apply any longer if there is no such thing as a software job.
Probably, the truth is that both free and unfree software both have their reasons to be, and neither will (or sh
Re:Reread the grandparent post: (Score:2)
Why would there be no software jobs? Nobody "pays" for HR or project management but there are HR and project management jobs whose cost is just part of overhead. Why is it assumed that software would need to be any different?
Re:Reread the grandparent post: (Score:2)
tip of the iceburg (Score:2)
I'm a programmer. I work for a company. They own the code. They use it themselves; they do not sell it to anyone.
I don't get royalties for any of the software I develop. I don't get paid licensing fees. I am paid wages for my time, and that is how I am paid to develop software.
That is how my working time is valued.
I don't have to subsidize my time after-the-fact with uncertain licensing fees, and if I stop working I do not continue to be paid. I am directly
Re:tip of the iceburg (Score:2)
Of course my work is not free.
I don't see what that has to do with software being free or not.
The software I write for my day job is proprietary , but there are more extreme examples; consider Cygnus solutions, who, as a "third party company" charged for their work, producing GPLed software.
(maybe they did some propreitary software I've forgotten about, but the bulk of their work was contracting as I recall)
Cygnus did very well at that up to the time they were bought out by Red H
Re:tip of the iceburg (Score:2)
I don't think it's equitable to pretend that "licenses sold" is a measure of work, whatever my opinions on charging for licenses might be.
If I were to live off of licensing fees alone, I wouldn't be being paid for my work, I would be subsidizing it.
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2)
They just feel like it? We are talking about humans here, not drones, right?
Writing software is part of their job? Lots of scientific software gets written like this. So do new research projects funded by big computer companies (e.g. Sun's Looking Glass).
Perhaps they expect to get their money from contract jobs (to customize said software) or
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2)
The post which started this thread said that the correct price for _most_ software is free. Note the word "most".
The problem here is that everyone keeps changing the subject. You did it, and I did too (sorry about that).
So okay, the entire software industry as it currently exists, which is what you're talking about, wouldn't exist if all software were free. But th
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2)
Interesting example. Right now there are thousands of diseases for which no effective treatment is known, and no one is trying to develop one. They are "orphan diseases", because there aren't enough people suffering from them to make such research profitable. This doesn't mean there aren't many people suffering from them, some, like malaria, affect millions of people worldwide, but they are too poor to make a treatment profitable for the pharma
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2)
I expect that India, China, and Brazil are carefully weighing the pros and cons of doing the same. Remember that "intellectual property" is a fiction created ostensibly for the purpose of makin
Re:The correct pricing structure for most software (Score:2, Insightful)
The only thing I can think of is perhaps some crazy conspiracy where beer drinker's urine is captured, bottled, and re-sold (rented). This is certainly not the case in Canada, where all my beer comes from.
SShhhh!!! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Didn't RTFA (Score:2)
You're wasting bits here.
Re:Didn't RTFA (Score:3, Interesting)
If you did read the article, though, you'll see that later on he does mention that there is an effect of price on demand (sometimes lowering price can actually lower demand - go figure) but he correctly points out that this is complicated and basically impossible to predict. Also, there is a difference between things like commodities (such as