OT Free Software 3425

Usually, the developers developing free software produce stuff that helps them to be, in some manner, more productive.

They produce software that provides their organization some kind of savings of costs such as licensing costs for "proprietary" software. That savings of licensing fees may be enough, in and of itself, to justify the efforts and therefore clearly justify wages and salaries.

Supposing it isn't totally worthwhile, in terms of visible, raw costs, it may still be worthwhile to "cast bread upon the waters" in view of the fact that your organization is using, without charge, free software that others have produced.

They don't pay you a licensing fee; you don't pay them a licensing fee; everyone gets the value out of having a web server, file server, database server, or such, without having to fork over thou$and$ of dollar$ of licen$ing fee$ to foreign $oftware companie$ (after all, to over 90% of the world's population, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and such are foreign companies).

Frankly, I find it a little surprising that my own government hasn't considered the "balance of trade" issue in their own use of proprietary versus free software. When they buy Microsoft software licenses, this injures our balance of trade, and sends (arguably valuable :-)) domestic currency to a foreign country. Using Samba, OpenOffice.org, and such would improve our balance of trade (in our favour) with the United States.

But the fact that licensing fees play NO ROLE AT ALL in free software is decidedly one of the important factors. -- Rules of the Evil Overlord #66. "My security keypad will actually be a fingerprint scanner. Anyone who watches someone press a sequence of buttons or dusts the pad for fingerprints then subsequently tries to enter by repeating that sequence will trigger the alarm system."