On Mon, 2013-04-15 at 23:25 +0100, Daniel Llewellyn wrote: ( snip )
Well, someone, somewhere has to pay something, somehow, or many people simply wouldn't produce 'free' (beer) software.
*****************************
Just look at reboot. pro: the devs. there don't charge, but do their
self-imposed tasks gratis. Doubtless, they are in paid employment in a
company, so do their creative work, in their spare time, purely for the
love of it - which, to my mind, is a perfectly good arrangement ( I,
too, did the same, for many years ).
I would argue that it's entirely fair to charge for tech support in
resolving device-specific knotty problems - eg. a " dd if " imaging
process, which screwed up my replication of dual-boot partitions onto a
bigger HD. Quite happy to pay for Tech Support, having been in that
business myself. Indeed, I just took out another support contract -
this time, on a newly-acquired dual-boot Mac box, to overcome presenting
yaboot Apple partition problems.
But software is only really a toolbox, and the tools should be free:
it's the labour that.to me, is valuable, almost beyond price. The human
input should rightly be valued - rather than the tools that do ( - or
don't effectively do - ) the job they are developed for.
Working in a software development house, I saw the human contribution
costed into overall Project costs, then recoverable through a hardware
implementation, powered by the associated software. But the software
was only ever regarded as a form of activation, of the far more
important hardware being submitted, from proof-of-concept, to
prototyping. This I consider a sounder basis for costing, pricing, &
fundamental IT investment, overall.
Dual-booting has been made more difficult than it inherently needs to
be, through deliberate software development to inhibit that capability;
accordingly, some hardware now needs a kind of team input, from more
than one head, to get it going properly ..
L
--
Please post to: Hampshire@???
Web Interface:
https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
LUG URL:
http://www.hantslug.org.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------
