For years, I have been a skeptic about the open source movement. While I have certainly been happy to benefit from all the free stuff available (to witness, my linux server running lots of good stuff in the background), it has been rare that an open source solution has been better for me than a commerical product.

The argument for free is, in my opinion, very shaky. Yeah, there are lots of poor college students (nothing personal, I was one once too!) who are happy to to get stuff for free and then spend their time hacking on it to make it work for them.

But time is a precious commodity, and the fact that the initial cost of a product may be free is often just a red herring. Yes, Photoshop CS5 will cost you a few hundred dollars. However, if your plan is to make a living as a graphic artist (say), then that initial cost is completely irrelevant. You care far more about the quantity (and quality) of support and infrastructure that is available. Just go into any book store and count the number of Photoshop books there.

If you're any good at being a graphic artist, you will make back the cost of Photoshop in an hour or two of work on behalf of your customers. And if you don't, then you probably shouldn't be a graphic artist!

People in the technical community can often be found sniggering at people who spend money on software products. They forget entirely that the technical community is a tiny percentage of the user community and most users care about completely different things.

My favorite example of this is the "laughter" that occurred on many technical forums when Apple announced that copy/paste would finally be available on iOS 3. They were quick to point out that copy/paste has been around for many years and how could it possibly have taken so long for Apple to have done it.

Ask yourself however, how many potential iPhone customers declined to buy the original iPhone because it lacked copy/paste? Obviously I don't know the answer but I bet it was a tiny percentage, if indeed it stopped anyone at all. For the most part, it just didn't matter. Was it a nuisance sometimes? Certainly it was a pain to have to write down an address on a piece of paper so you could later type it into an email. But the benefits of the device far outweighted that disadvantage and people bought it in droves.

Apple understands that deeply. And they're quite happy to sell their product into the 99% of the market and just not worry about the tiny minority that's complaining.

If your livelihood depends on your making money from your product, I guarantee that you're going to try much harder to deliver what the customer wants, rather than just what you and perhaps a few of your peers find interesting.

There are certainly some great open source products out there. Linux itself is certainly amazingly solid and of course services like the LAMP stack, sendmail are ubiquitous in the "engine room". On the client side, products such as Firefox and Thunderbird are terrific. But there's not a lot of such things that regular folks "must" have that's not available (with decent support) commercially for reasonable prices and without the need to have to "hack" to make it work. (I still get nervous whenever I have to yum or apt-get something).

A few years ago, the Linux Journal had an article bemoaning the lack of marketing for open source products. I wrote back to them and offered to make my new product available for free. All I would need, I explained, was the inside front cover of their magazine for the following 6 months, without any payment of course. Obviously, there were no takers. That's not a surprise of course, even the people behind the Linux Journal need to make money.

It's easy to be a fan of open source if you are being paid by someone else to develop it, perhaps a large organization that's mainly leveraging open source for its own needs, in which case the code base is being used to support some other product that's being sold. Otherwise you're either in a tiny minority making money (probably through support services) or doing it for fun (or you're a college student with plenty of spare time). In the latter two cases, you have no incentive to make your product be great for customers (ego satisfaction is wonderful but doesn't pay the bills).

Now, I'm a software developer myself and I sell my products for a living. I'm certainly technically proficient in a number of areas. But I can tell you that I have zero interest in spending many hours of my time trying to get an open source app (that's never quite complete) working when I can buy a decent commercial product for $20, or $50, or even $2,000 if necessary and be instantly productive. The time investment is just generally not worth it - that's the bottom line.

So until you make your open source product feature complete, reliable, easy to use, trivial to install, and with decent documentation and support where necessary, you're not getting my business. Nor that of most regular folks who just need to get the job done!

It's very interesting to see comments similar to the above beginning to show up in some Linux related RSS feeds . But it's not a surprise.