"You get what you pay for."

This seems to be a theme throughout WW

[bumpski]

"You get what you pay for."

This seems to be a theme throughout WW recently.

However if you extrapolate this logic, nothing free would have any value, like the Apache webserver, or Google Analytics, or heck, Google itself!

And, Wow, most webmaster's websites!

[brotherhood of LAN]

WW = these forums?

The thing with open source and Google is that they were built on expertise, albeit unpaid.

Generally site owners don't have free UI/programmers/SEOs at hand.

[Samizdata]

like the Apache webserver

The Apache webserver is a wonderful thing, and it is indeed free.

But it has no value on its own.

You need a computer to put it on.

You need electricity to power it.

You need an internet connection to get it on the web.

You need bandwidth to serve files to the world.

All of these things cost money.

The Apache webserver is a wonderful thing, but you get what you pay for.

...

[not2easy]

Just my view, but I think that in most discussions, the phrase "You get what you pay for." is referring to deciding how much something is worth, rather than denigrating free resources. Most of us use free resources frequently, I do anyway. But if I needed to hire a programmer or a writer, I think I would weigh the advantages of paying for a level of service that I would be satisfied with rather than shopping around to see who could do it for less money.

[incrediBILL]

I'm in a real mood today, let 'er rip...

However if you extrapolate this logic, nothing free would have any value, like the Apache webserver, or Google Analytics, or heck, Google itself!

Apache is a bunch of cryptic crap that even hard core apache users still don't fully understand half the time. If you had a quality web server you paid for you would expect easy to install rules, tools to set up all those crazy cryptic config files, etc..

It works. It's free.

However, if I sold it to a customer I'd expect a refund after they tried to configure it.

Google keeps taking things away from webmasters, penalizing them for god knows what, trying to dictate everything they do and making them all insane.

It's free. It works.

However, if I sold a website to a customer that ranked and it vanished the next week, which happens all the time, I'd expect they'd ask for a refund which is why I got out of that game.

While we're at it, Facebook is also free, everyone uses it but screams #*$! murder as Facebook becomes less user friendly by the day and took what we loved and turned it into something else, but it's free, deal with it.

Twitter is the same way, initially you could build add-on Twitter apps to make it actually usable and then they cut the API and suddenly we're all trapped in that horrible hell of malfunctioning javascript twitter webpage and an equally atrocious twitter app, but it's free and all you can eat, enjoy.

The whole world uses PHP which is 100% slow buggy hackable crap, Perl or Python would be better choices, yet we gobble up the garbage when ALL THREE ARE FREE!

You get what you pay for, it's all free, it's all a maddening pain in the ass, yet we just keep feeding that beast instead of fixing it because people are mindless sheep that go with the herd...

... even when the herd is running off a cliff to certain doom, such as drinking the Google kool-aid.

If there were better alternatives to all of the above, even paid alternatives, I would gladly use them but the cheap masses would not.

Basically, all of the ads aimed at the people with money support the sites for those that couldn't afford to use a fee service. If all of the unhappy cash-packing consumers found a paid platform and moved off all the free crap where they have no say whatsoever, the free stuff would vanish under the migration and create a digital divide.

It will eventually happen, in some areas it already is happening.

[graeme_p]

Why are the paid alternatives not better? There are paid alternatives to Apache, and PHP (and Perl and Python).

A lot of free things make money in some way. Google and Facebook sell ads. Linux is free but its funded by people who make money off it (Red Hat because it sells a licensed version with support, IBM because it helps shift their hardware, etc.).

[ronin]

Basically, all of the ads aimed at the people with money support the sites for those that couldn't afford to use a fee service. If all of the unhappy cash-packing consumers found a paid platform and moved off all the free crap where they have no say whatsoever, the free stuff would vanish under the migration and create a digital divide.

[...] in some areas it already is happening.

Caldwell's App.net remains a brave move and history will reveal if it was one with great foresight.

Personally, I like very much the concept of the service as the commodity, paid for by the user. (Rather than the user's data being the commodity, paid for by the advertiser).

But I am sceptical that paid social media / paid data services will ever be adopted by anyone outside a group of fervent enthusiasts who value privacy / full access to their data / absence of advertising more than "free".

I suppose the dynamics would change if the user's payment for paid social media / paid data services were already incorporated into their monthly broadband subscription package, given that most people don't tend to distinguish between "free" and "included".

[engine]

Very little in life is free, and in business, there's no way it's free. It's paid for somehow: Ads, sponsorship, selling databases of your details, marketing, etc. Most "free" things are attached to some other kind of deal.

It's worth noting that if something is cheap, there's usually a reason for it: For example, it's manufactured or developed in a low wage sector, or sometimes because it's simply, just bad.

You also get things at the other end of the scale where it's relatively expensive. But does that make it good? I have seen many instances of expensive solutions that offer little extra value to something more cost-effective. Compare a top marque car, or any other ordinary car. They are top marques because they should be better. They still get you from A to B and all points in between, whichever car you choose. Drive a top marque, or drive a low cost alternative, the choice is your, but remember, there are differences.

You get what you pay for, but it's important to have an understanding of why it's priced that way.

[tangor]

If one complains about "you get what you pay for" regarding "free stuff" then one really doesn't know how to make use of the free stuff, or is using a financial metric which, in and of itself, makes no sense.

As for the free stuff (G Apache, Perl ... my fave ... , PHP, etc.) you get out of it only what you put into it. In most cases that is TIME and EFFORT followed by more TIME and EFFORT. Whew!

You really do get what you pay for, if YOU make use of what you got for what you paid! (I see more sites running on the free stuff than the paid stuff... and doing quite well.)

[graeme_p]

Free software is not always more effort. Are the paid equivalents of those really any easier to set up for any real site? Cherokee is free AND very easy to set up but no one uses it because most people want the flexibility of those config files.

Windows and MacOS only recently got easy software installation through "stores" in the last few years, whereas Linux has had repositories for a decade.

Software is also a special case because free software avoids vendor lock-in. Lots of people pay Red Hat for a license to get support, but they can still easily switch to another distro if they are unhappy with Red Hat.

A lot of free software is developed by government or not for profit funding. A lot of development is paid for by users: Fetchmail was developed for internal use, Facebook has forked PHP, the creator of Python is employed by Dropbox (and used to be employed by Google).

@engine, cats are not a good example: very similar cars from the same manufacturer can be sold under different brand names for substantial differences in price. A lot of what you pay for with a top marque is the marque.