[Liverpool] Money

[Simon Johnson]

> I’m inclined to believe that those who make income from selling software
> products are in a large part responsible for a lot of software being
> half‐baked and riddled with bugs.

There is lots of free software that is low quality. Being libre does
not by any means guarantee the code is any good. All it guarantees is
that one can run and modify it as they please.

However, that said, I believe that many of the best free software
projects have considerably higher code quality than commercial code
bases.

I've seen enough commercial code bases to know that quality is not
particularly high. This is not because of developer incompetence but
just because doing something right is usually extremely time
consuming.

>  It’s people attempting to sell
> software products in that way that are forcing those of us trying to
> make a living from actually making the software to cut corners to get a
> product out.

Shipping is a feature. A lot of libre software projects miss this
fundamental point. Debian just didn't _get_ this for a very long time.
Herd never got it :)

Another point that is often missed is that the priorities of
developers rarely align with the priorities of users.

This is why I believe you can probably make a successful business out
of selling free software. There is value in having people you as a
user can pay to support and orchestrate development of an libre
project. People you can pay to share your priorities.