Come for the Price, stay for the Freedom?

It’s time for impossible to prove conjecture Tuesday! Today I’ll be looking at freedom and price. Those two great pillars of our movement from barbaric propriety and gouging monopolies into a bright future of open sharing and low-low prices.

I read about the Future of Open Source Survey and according to it’s findings most respondents value ‘open source’ and will be deploying it. But more intriguingly this time around instead of valuing ‘open source’ for costs reasons, the value is more firmly placed in Freedom.

This freedom can mean all sorts of things depending on what you do, and unlike what far too many commentators say about access to source code not being important to non-programmers; it isn’t actually about the source code at all.

So what happened to all that low-low price hype? I think that we’re reaching maturity. First FOSS is attractive to anyone who doesn’t quite understand it because of it’s apparent cost benefits. That is, what has already been written is free for anyone to use. Explaining the benefits of Free Software to someone who doesn’t see the problem of proprietary software is impossible.

Once you’re using an open source platform, of course it’s much easier to calculate the benefits of investing in the improvement of the code (hiring/contracting developers) against simply buying a replacement off the shelf product. This is what makes advocating FOSS so interesting, you never know if the person you’re convincing to use Ubuntu will turn around and spend money on helping it grow later.

So why is freedom now important to all these cost conscious businesses? I believe that the successful foss product in any market pretty much sets the commodity cost and any propriety software will have to either beat the cost or improve on features in orders of magnitude better. The problem of course is that a lot of these businesses have gotten a taste of what it’s like when you can take your internal tools and change them to do anything in any way your business requires. This is something that proprietary software vendors find hard and expensive to do well.

So, my conjecture today is: “People will be attracted by the price and with enough time, stay for the Freedom”

Your thoughts?