Do you value things more if you pay for them?
I've heard lots of people say that you value things more if you pay for them. I think that's changing for internet technologies and open source software. I can see how you would value something traditional more if you pay for it – instead of being free and therefore worth nothing and easily replaceable, it's was worth your hard earned money. It's the same principle that keeps people's closets full of junk – they paid for it, it's worth money and therefore they can't throw it away. It might cost them money to replace! But technology is different.
- First off, you did invest something in that free download. You had to research it, find it, install it, evaluate it. Once you've downloaded it, played with it and got it working all right, you've invested a lot of your time in it. Throwing it away for a competing project would mean throwing away all that time and knowledge.
- Sometimes the free one works better. As someone who's trying to get work done, I value the software that works.
- Some things are supposed to be free. I might value my $10 tshirt more than the free one I got at the conference (not just because it cost $10 but also because I invested time in picking it out, comparison shopping, etc) but I don't think the same holds true for email services. I don't value my $29/year Yahoo mail more than my free Gmail just because I paid Yahoo because I expect basic email services to be free these days.
So, I think if a company paid $100,000 for Oracle, they might value it more than the open source PostgreSQL but I think that's changing. They won't value that web server software they bought more than Apache. As the open source software solutions become more and more popular, reliable and expected, they will be valued just as much as the proprietary ones if not more. And people will always invest time in open source software – it takes substantial amounts of time to select, evaluate and choose a technology solution.
BTW, even with Google, I couldn't find the original study that says that people value things more if they pay for them – if you know where it is, let me know.
