Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba posts a long diatribe on how the new release of NetNewsWire¹ is a very bad thing for commercial software developers Mac-world wide. Because NNW and FD are now free. While I claim absolutely no authority when it comes to business logic, economics and related fields, I think Paul would do well to quit his bitching on the matter.

You see, free software² has been around for quite a long time now. It’s been available for Windows, for Mac and for Linux alike. It has provided sufficient value that people have used it without major angst while they were always free to ask for more features [or even code their own, in certain cases.] It has pushed major software houses to do their best and come up with newer and better things. Yes, many of these things get copied freely and en masse into free software; after all, it wouldn’t be that difficult to clone TaskPaper with its simple brilliance.

I hardly think this will put software writers out of a job. The market that Kafasis refers to has called for software-as-a-service and it is that market that pushed NewsGator to release NetNewsWire free of charge. Smaller houses [and RogueAmoeba is a great Mac software outfit] may feel pressured by all of this - but I believe that to be an overreaction. Even if all software does become free, support can still be charged for. As he himself puts it, the way to separate your product from someone else’s is through features and if certain types of applications seem to be limited in the number of features they could possibly have, many will thrive on their ’special somethings’ and may just survive the trend that Kafasis is so worried about.

1. And FeedDemon for Windows users, too [↩]
2. For the purposes of this entry and in the context of software, ‘free’ is limited to the mundane meaning of cost-less [↩]