[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.victz4b5eav7ka at localhost.localdomain...
> The only measurable factor for "good" art is how many  people use it/buy 
> it.

That's not a bad point - I can't think of many other metrics for art. 
Quality certainly can positively influence popularity. But I think we have 
to be careful not to conflate "popularity" with "quality" too much. Similar 
to the old saying: "What's popular is not always right. What's right is not 
always popular." PHP is wildly popular, but for anyone actually familiar 
with a variety of languages, the quality is undeniably poor, so again, we 
have to be careful with assuming connections between popularity and quality.

> For-sale software, books, movies do rather well, so  I'm inclined to 
> believe they are pretty good.  There are also some open  source/free 
> materials that do rather well, but they are not nearly as  common as free 
> materials that are crappy.  My point was that for-sale art  by far 
> outperforms freely available art in popularity and usage.  When you  get 
> paid to make something, you can do it more often, you get better at  it, 
> and your quality of work goes up.
>

I'm not disagreeing with the phenomenon you describe, but I think there are 
other contrary factors in play as well:

- For-sale anything tends to have more marketing behind it than free 
(because if you're trying to get money for it, you're more motivated to get 
it out in front of people), so that can be a factor in the popularity/usage 
of for-sale things. If you're trying to sell your paintings, you're more 
likely to try to go as as many art fairs as you can, get business cards made 
out to hand out, get a spot and display that people will really notice, push 
your website, etc. If your work is free, you have less reason to do all 
that, which in turn, works against popularity and usage.

- Free stuff is more likely to be a labor of love (because if you're not 
getting paid for it, why else bother if not because you truly care?), while 
for-sale tends to involve people who just don't give a crap about anything 
but the paycheck. They know something will sell as-is, so why waste the 
resources making it as good as they can make it, like the "labor of love" 
people would do?

Businessmen have long ago learned that, contrary to the old saying, "If you 
build a better mousetrap, the world will NOT beat a path to your door". 
Especially if the world doesn't even know you've done so. They'll just keep 
using their inferior, but popular, mousetraps. But if you can *convince* 
them you've built a better one, regardless of whether or not it's actualy 
true, then they *will*, metaphorically, beat a path to your door.