About a month ago I was chatting with a friend of mine about web-based software. I was talking about basecamp, which I really like but was unsure if I could justify paying for as a starving Masters student. My friend said “…. Wait, you are thinking about *paying* for a web app?!?” The concept completely stunned him, paying for something on the internet when everything he used, facebook, google docs and gmail were all free seemed ludicrous. Sometime more recently another of my friends mentioned in passing to me “I would never pay for software.”
Although linux never really took off as a mainstream operating system, popular web platforms and applications like wordpress, nginx and rails seem to be making a strong case that free software may be the way of the future on the internet. Maybe soon we will never pay for things that people with college degrees who could easily have been highly paid engineers spent years working on. I have only one caveat, and that is What The Hell!!?!
I was recently reading an article on “The developer as a starving artist“. This article claims that as tools for development make development faster, simpler and cheaper, developers will be churning out great projects for free for fun. There will still be money in software but it will be in providing these “for fun” applications, in the same way people make money using apache to sell web hosting. The excellent developers will make money while most will be like artists “scraping by”.
The issue with this is that to be a *good* developer you actually have to be really smart. Really smart people go to college and take degrees that are hard to get into and pay them money, they don’t decide to work for free. If we stop paying developers then the same really smart people currently becoming developers will abandon software development for other lucrative professions that require being very smart. This will make software crappy and good software will once again be in greater demand. (aka able to charge.)
What about my thoughts on the future of the industry? As software development becomes easier and cheaper smaller teams of devs can build more extensive applications faster. What this means is that something like ebay, which was written by and employs many developers, can be replicated and improved upon by a dedicated group of 2-4 developers in under a year. Amazon took massive amounts of money to develop, now I can build an online store in under a month by myself. the key being to do this well, you still need a group of *good* developers. I think more startups will start to challenge big complacent companies, and we will begin to see more competition across product spaces. For a developer to make 180 000$ per year, a pretty dang good salary, they need to make an app that only 1000 people are willing to pay 15$ per month for! Once upon a time starting a serious software company was a large capital and time investment, now it’s more like opening a McDonalds. Given these economics and the speed of creating good applications it almost doesn’t make sense to go work a full time job unless a developer *needs* a stable income because they have children or something.
Developers go forth and prove me right. Make good apps that people will pay for and let the free software enthusiasts be damned. Good software is worth money and always will be.