Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Open source software activity usually bumps up quite a lot before and during Christmas.  This time around I am waiting for:

• Fedora 10, which should be released today.
• WordPress 2.7, which should be released “some time in November“.
• Firefox 3.1, which is approaching its second beta.

What are your waiting for this year?

There is a lot of noise going about these news:

The Foreign Ministry is migrating all of its 11.000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other Open source applications.

That’s good.  Both the noise and the news.  But it’s not the first time that we hear about this or that government office moving to Linux desktops.  It happened before.  What I am more interested in hearing is the “after” life.  Something along the lines of “Look, we moved to Linux desktops one year ago and we are doing better than ever.  We are happier and we also spend less money”.  How many of those moved roll back to what they had before?  Why did they roll back? How many stay?  How many of those who stay are more satisfied?  How much cheaper it is for them?

That’s what I’d like to hear.

The other day Bloggin Pro posted a question “Would You Pay for WordPress and How Much?“.  Of course, I’ve already mentioned that I have no problem paying for WordPress.  How much?  Well, I think that around $50 per installation is a fair price.  But that is not for me to decide.

I thing I keep thinking about though.  A big part of what WordPress is, is it’s freedom. Anyone can get it. Anyone can use it for whatever they want.  Anyone can modify it.  And a lot of people do.  If WordPress will ever become commercial software, it will greatly decrease the amount of people who use it, test it, and develop for it.  And with that, the value of WordPress will stop growing as it is now.  Once the value of it will stop growing as it is now, a lot of people will reconsider their answer to the question “Are you prepared to pay for WordPress?”.

Gladly, Matt and the rest of the Automattic gang seem to clearly understand that.