Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 25th Oct 2006 08:41 UTC
A few months ago we ran a poll about the most important non-free Linux apps. We had over 8,000 votes in that poll and we consider the results pretty interesting. Interesting enough to push Linux's market share if a distro capitalized on them?
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RE[4]: My Recommendations.
by netpython on Wed 25th Oct 2006 14:46
in reply to "RE[3]: My Recommendations."
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-06
I think that people are reluctant to pay for porly written or porly supported software. Unfortunately this is often the case for software that have been ported to Linux from other platforms.
E.g. look at Nero CD burning software. It may be very good on windows but compared to its free competitors on Linux it looks like a rather blunt instrument. On top of that it is written using very a old GUI toolkit, that makes it stand out as old and outdated. Of course people don't pay for these kind of things.
One other thing, if you look at the websites of many software venders that tries to provide Linux ports, the Linux version is often described as some kind of experiment, with nom promises of future support, or future availability. Still the Linux version often carries the same price as versions for more common platforms. No wonder they are hard to sell.
On the other hand, it doesn't seam to be any problem to sell well written software such as Oracle, DB2, VMWare, Maya, Mathematica, Math Lab, Websphere... All of these are quite expensive, but still sold. Not to mention that the Linux distros frequently used in business such as Red Hat are far from cheap. So clearly at least business are willing to spend money on Linux products.
If we are talking about the consumer market, the situation is different. My guess is that most consumers (unlike you) doesn't have that much money to spend. This means that they will go for a platform where they easily can buy one or two games, and pirate the rest from their friends.
Edited 2006-10-25 14:46