By carlmcdade on

This is a discussion concerning business practices and businesses based on open source. Some think that is obligatory for packaging and servicing of opensource to be free as the code it self. What are your thoughts?

Comments

garm’s picture

garm commented

my thoughts isnt realy important because it´s completely up to the specifiq situation and person/company offering the service/packaging.

But my opinion generaly speaking is that a service needs to cost money, if it doesnt cost your client money you need to make money in another way to be able to provide your clients with a quality service.

Sure you can just for fun do it for free, but in the end someone else needs to pay for your resources and time, atleast if your service is going to have any sort of quality feeling to it.

So no i do not agree that a quality service should be free, if people realy needs their applications/software and their service to be free then they either dont need a quality service or they simply just dont live in the real world.

Open source software is great and it works, but i just dont see how every single service out there could be free aswell, if they were who would be working for those companies? and if no one works for them who would provide us with broadband, hosting, who would design and deliver media solutions etc, because as fun as it is, it takes time and money to provide a service.

The answer is of course advertisement, but as we all know a growing number of people disables that so that alone wont be able to pay for it.

Low quality services is and can be for free, but a quality service just cant, unless the company in question providing the service makes alot of money on something else and sees it as goodwill and cheap advertisement providing that service but in the end it still costs money, just that the company in question charge more money for something else.