[Liverpool] Discussions at the last LivLUG regarding Symbian

[Simon Johnson]

I write a lot of software and it's all very much closed source. In fact,
it's closed distribution because I don't even distribute it. I write
software, I use it privately, and never give it to anyone.

The reason is not so much a dislike of free software (quite the opposite, I
use free software daily) but rather the problem that being a free software
developer/distributor is a *lot *of work.

I once wrote an application that auto-updates a block list of ActiveX
controls on a local computer. It did this by downloading a publicly
available block list and adding to the registry on the computer in
question. At its peak, I had around 20,000 downloads. A moderate success,
you'll agree.

The problem comes from the users.

   - They'll write to you and complain it doesn't work,
   - They'll write to you asking for feature x, feature y,
   - Then you'll get people who say they installed it on their network and a
   core app no longer works and they're being blamed and it's somehow your
   fault.

Meanwhile, you're bored of your application that you wrote to scratch your
own itch and want to move on to something else.

Worse, writing free software is *harder* than closed source stuff. You have
to write higher quality code. You have to organise it sensibly, you have to
come up with coding guidelines for submitting patches, you have document it
so that people can alter it. All this is good software engineering practice,
but it takes a lot more effort than some app you design for yourself.

Therefore, I have concluded that to release the same application as a free
software application, I will have to spend twice the effort to release it as
I would if I just kept it to myself. If I do release it, I have an
obligation to maintain it, patch it and fix security issues. This adds a
post delivery on going cost which could run for the rest of my life.

 In free software the primary currency is *time*. If I'm lucky, I'll spend
approximately three billion seconds on earth. That time is precious. In the
time I can dedicate to programming outside work, I'd like to spend almost
all of that time on interesting programming problems - not on the overhead
of delivering free software.

When I do the return on investment calculation, it turns out that the closed
source is the best idea.

I do wonder how many businesses make the same calculation, not out of
a philosophical objection to free software, but on the basis that it simply
costs more to be involved in the free software community?

Cheers,

Simon


On 8 April 2011 05:20, Andrew Bates <oscillik at gmail.com> wrote:

> The other night we were discussing Nokia and their seemingly contradictory
> statements that Symbian is now "no longer open source", to the disbelief of
> many luggers!
>
> well, here is the link to their official statement
> http://symbian.nokia.com/blog/2011/04/04/not-open-source-just-open-for-business/
>
> yeah, as I'm sure we can all agree - Nokia seem to have a somewhat strange
> way of dealing with things!
>
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