Some thoughts on proprietary software

Just now I read Bradley Kuhn's recent blog post entitled Proprietary Software Licensing Produces No New Value In Society. The argument made is, in essence, that by receiving money for a proprietary license, a developer is paid without doing any work. This argument is, in its simplicity, quite pre-industrial in nature and fundamentally flawed. Let me explain:

Bradley, in your post, you compared software development to constructing houses. The problem with this is that houses aren't copied - they're singletons. We need a better analogy.

Think suits

Let's say you want to buy a new suit. You have a couple of fundamentally different options: you can either contact a tailor, and pay them to make one. This is a very simple model: the tailor works on a suit, knowing that they'll be paid. In the end, you pay them for the actual work involved. It makes a lot of sense. This is akin to custom software development, where one is paid by the hour.

However, there is a cheaper alternative: go to a store and buy a ready-to-wear, off-the-shelf product. It's probably good enough, and you'll pay a lot less. You're actually getting value for money, I'm sure you'll agree that it's perfectly reasonable to pay for this. However, the way the money flows is a lot less direct and obvious:

At the beginning, someone designed the suit you're buying, without being paid (or being paid by a company that isn't getting paid yet). Someone set up a production line, without being paid directly, on the mere speculation that someone might buy the suit. And now, you, the customer, are (in addition to the manufacturing and distribution costs, which don't exist in software development) retroactively paying the designer for the work they might have done years ago.

Instead of clothing, I could have used any number of other examples, such as any kind of engineered hardware, or even books. However, nobody buys custom-tailored books.

With software, in addition to financing speculative work done in the past without direct remuneration, you're usually paying for support, for bug-fixes, and for future upgrades: You are, actually, helping to finance continued work. Here, I'm mostly thinking of small software development shops, not so much big corporations like Oracle or Microsoft. For more of an insider's perspective (I myself am a student and have experience only with custom (web) software development and free software projects), I can recommend a nice article by Virgil Dupras of Hardcoded Software, recently linked on the python-dev list.

There is an ongoing micro-discussion on identi.ca that might interest you.

As a small clarification: I support free software, but I think that a strict interpretation of freedoms 2 and 3 can have its problems in a world governed by markets and money.