OT Free Software 3422

And of course, if someone just cooks something up for their own use, releasing it as open source may cost them nothing. It's too specific to have much sales potential (or is yet another editor or something that is common so while it may appeal to someone, it won't appeal to many), and trying to sell it yourself isn't worth the effort. Let it loose, just in case someone can make use of it.

There may be instances of this in industry circles. A company needs to do something very specific, but it's not directly in support of their business. They have to pay someone to write the software because it's not already available, but they don't care that others have it afterwards, so they let it loose.

For that matter, if someone is trying to come up with a quick solution, open source may save them some work since they don't have to start from scratch. But of course, when they use open source as the foundation, they have to then make the results open source. Their benefit is that they don't have to write something from nothing, which is what happened in the old days (or maybe in the middle ages of computing), where if someone liked a bit of software but wanted it slightly different, either had to disbuttembly the thing and patch it, or write a workalike from scratch. Using open source as a foundation may not result in income, but it will lower the cost of the secondary program.

Michael