Yup. I agree on that count too. There are definitely things out there are free have great value and work very well. jQuery comes to mind for one... but also lots of software like FireFox, Gimp, FileZilla, Paint.Net just to name a few that I use daily.

But it's also more the exception than the rule that products do as well. High profile items exist of course, but the overall expectation of free is dangerous because it drives companies like Microsoft to look for profit elsewhere - namely in services and subscriptions which are much more devious than product purchases that you can usually opt out of. Subscriptions and services is much harder to avoid (think mobile phone contracts) as well as lock-in dependencies.

I used to really enjoy building tools and components but I can no longer justify doing that sort of thing as there's no payback there anymore. People will go to free solutions even if often inferior. It's very difficult to compete with free unless you're also free. And as Mike mentioned if you rely on income of that work that's just not going to work.

It also degrades consulting. Over the years I've found a lot more people balking at consulting rates that used to be accepted without much thought, but now - even after years of inflation - things get thought over and reviewed a million times even for little things. Part of that I think is because people can get so much software for free that expecting to pay a fortune for custom code, or even support seems oddly out of proportion.

I'm not immune to this either. I often find myself hunting for free stuff first when clearly there are good paid solutions out there, and often better. To make things worse I find that often the companies that are still around selling commercial software often are vastly overpriced and tending towards over-intense subscription models - they're not aiming for the low level, but aiming at the high end market!

Times have changed 2 steps forward - 1 step back...

I think we'll have some interesting times ahead to see where this all shakes out.

+++ Rick ---


>>>For me personally I rather pay a reasonable amount of money for a tool/platform/service and get a responsible infrastructure that goes with it and supports it than picking up small pieces and piecing it all together by myself with trial and error
>
>Agreed.
>I started doing web development last year. Someone directed me at some free HTML editors and after gnashing my teeth for a few days I happily purchased Dreamweaver, which was worth every buck.
>Adobe does a great job with Dreamweaver and they are entitled to make a reasonable profit for it.
>
>On the other hand, one of my hobbies is digital photography, and recently when I needed some new editing software someone steered me to Gimp, a free open source photo editing platform.
>It's not as slick or polished as Photoshop, etc, but it does everything I need and I'm not constantly bombarded with upgrade or renewal reminders.
>Some excellent programmers somewhere did a great job with it and I'm thankful to them.
>
>So in once case I pay and in the other I don't.
>
>When I first came into the business, when discussing creative output, we used to say that "an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite period of time will eventually produce all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets."
>With today's tools, you'd have to amend that to say that a few good programmers sitting at a few good machines for a few weeks can produce just about anything they want to produce.
>
>That means that the days of software monopolies are over and that anyone who wants to make money selling software has to be ready to do what Adobe does - do it better than the free stuff does it.