Dare Obansanjo: "A key benefit of Open Source/Free Software to software consumers is that it tends to drive the price of the software to zero. "
Another conclusion is that the 'software business' is breathtakingly inefficient and what we mean by "zero" is relative. In that light, a key benefit of Open Source/Free Software is that it reduces waste, via a sort of proto-industrialisation. The cost benefits of not writing software get passed back to consumers, not unlike the way Gutenburg, Wedgwood, Colt let more people have better books, crockery and guns at lower prices, and then McLean helped distribute them for zero, which meant they could be made anywhere.
Even OSS is in need of some rationalisation. Individually it's fun to keep rewriting web frameworks, content management systems, enterprise middleware, build systems, interface definition languages, AtomPub servers, and so on. At a macro-economic level it's a waste of electricity and natural resources - that might come to be seen as unethical (I know, that's crazy talk :). IOW maybe it's no harm for green computing efforts to be looking at waste in software itself, and not just physical things like computers and datacenters.
3 Comments
So, for nature's sake we should stop writing software in dynamically typed languages?
Peter, yeah. Let's roll with Haskell :)
This suggestion seems to assume that the only product of software development is software itself, so when a new piece of software is written to solve a problem that has already been solved by software, no new value is derived.
I think it's plain to see that this is not the case. First, new software very rarely ever solves the problem in the exact same manner, often leading to better solutions for varied needs. Second, some of the byproducts of software development are independently valuable, such as an evolution of development processes, greater wisdom from varied perspectives and maintenance of a competitive market to drive innovation in general.
In other words, it's not quite as simple as the suggestion made it sound to me. F/OSS will continue to evolve software and intellectual capital the same way that multiple auto makers compete to further the state of the art in efficient automobiles. There's probably room for scrapping particularly low quality duplicate software, but there is already a free market of software in place to regulate this. In summary, calling F/OSS wasteful as a whole is overly simplistic.