[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:34:00 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:

> "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.

Imagine if you had to pay for it ;)

>> 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.

There is that part of it.  Some companies can sell whatever they want  
because of marketing, i.e. Microsoft.  But one thing that for-sale art  
does is weed out the unpopular artists.  Make a crappy product, and many  
people won't buy your next one.  Look how hard Vista hit Microsoft despite  
their huge marketing machine.

As far as free software advertisement though, most of that is negated by  
google these days :)  Just yesterday I wanted to find a tool that diff'd  
mysql database schemas so I could sync one to the other.  In about 10  
minutes I found 2-3 candidates that were free and I didn't use any of  
them, because they seemed unfinished, or required installing other stuff  
just to get it to work.  What I ended up using is advise on a forum that  
said to just diff the results of the mysqldump.

But I think you would agree the truly great free products/software don't  
have a problem with marketing because growth today is viral when someone  
finds something that is awesome, free or not.

> - 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?

I think most good products are labors of love, even ones that are not  
free.  There are many cases that are not, and are "just there for the  
money," but those usually aren't as successful.  As you say, not as much  
effort is put into those.  But if something is good, and people will pay  
for it, why wouldn't you want to charge for it so you can continue doing  
it?  I don't understand the thought process that necessarily links love  
for a job or quality of art to working for free.  I love programming, but  
love or not, it would just be a toy hobby if I had to spend the majority  
of my day doing something else in order to support myself and my family.

>
> 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.

Yes, there are plenty examples of that.

-Steve