Why is it free?
Piggy backing a bit on Peter's recent post, I thought that it would be worth spending a little time talking from a different perspective about free (as in beer) software and services. After seeing umpteen requests for "free or cheap" things to do this or that, I thought that it was worth explaining a bit about why things are free, and what you should take into consideration when adopting free or cheap software or services for mission critical functions. Also, of course, I'm not talking about the cost of implementation. Software and services, no matter how cheap to obtain, costs something in time and/or consultant resources to implement.
Development and maintenance of software or services always costs somebody something. It might just be a bit of time, or it could be very significant resources (thousands or millions of dollars.) These are basically the reasons software is free (or really cheap):
Services like Twitter are in search of a business model. Chances are they'll be around, but some of them might not be (like Magnolia).
Services, by nature, are more risky beasts than software, because they can go away in the blink of an eye, and you could lose everything, and people do. At least with software, if you've downloaded it, even if the company goes belly up, you still have use of the software.
Unless software is open source, and has a community around it, you can't really guarantee it's future. A company can decide it's tired of the loss. It can decide not to give it away anymore. It can decide to change the feature set of the "lite" version.
All of this is to say, look carefully at why a particular software is free or cheap before you adopt it for a mission critical organizational function. It's likely to save you grief, later.
Development and maintenance of software or services always costs somebody something. It might just be a bit of time, or it could be very significant resources (thousands or millions of dollars.) These are basically the reasons software is free (or really cheap):
- It is free and open source.
- It scratched a particular person's itch, and they want to give it to the world for free.
- It is a loss leader for a company who is trying to upsell.
- It is a "lite" version of a more expensive package or service.
- It is in search of a business model, or is trying to be bought.
- Revenue is driven primarily by advertising.
- It is a donation from a software behemoth.
Services like Twitter are in search of a business model. Chances are they'll be around, but some of them might not be (like Magnolia).
Services, by nature, are more risky beasts than software, because they can go away in the blink of an eye, and you could lose everything, and people do. At least with software, if you've downloaded it, even if the company goes belly up, you still have use of the software.
Unless software is open source, and has a community around it, you can't really guarantee it's future. A company can decide it's tired of the loss. It can decide not to give it away anymore. It can decide to change the feature set of the "lite" version.
All of this is to say, look carefully at why a particular software is free or cheap before you adopt it for a mission critical organizational function. It's likely to save you grief, later.
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