And software that cost $30 now costs $100+! Producing millions of complicated hardware reduces its price, but the price of software which costs pennies to reproduce stays high.
When will people wise up and switch to open source?
The first external hard drive we bought at my previous place of employment, about 25 years ago was a full height 5 1/4 inch one in an external rack type case, which had space to add a second drive, and also contained the power supply, and a SASI controller. It was 16 MB formatted, and cost over three thousand pounds. We thought that we'd never manage to fill that much space! The heads didn't park automatically, and you couldn't do it from software; you had to remove the top of the case, and turn a small wheel on the side of the drive before powering it down.
I remember getting my first large memory board that was capable of 64K of static RAM populated to 16K for just under $1000. I had to write my own drivers for the floppy disk interface and beat the market technology using a double sided 5.25" drive with 40 tracks instead of the usual 35 tracks. This took it past the 100K of storage.
But those were still the advanced days from the Motorola MEK6800D2 kits. 1K of RAM memory was a huge upgrade and was almost a dream. I had to do a lot of foil scratching and air mounting to get those four chips wired in. Two note music was a big fascination and a few of us defined standards to store musical notes in so they could be shared with others using 1802 RCA processors. PCs (Intel) were never heard of and IBM didn't make micro PCs period. They were only toys until they put their name on them.
It's amazing how fast things progress. If someone 10 years ago had told me that by now you'd be able to buy a 2 Terabyte 3.5" hard drive for ~$100 I'd have thought they were on drugs. The first hard drive I bought was 340MB and cost around $400, and that seemed like a bargain at the time.
It cost pennies to *reproduce* but how much do you think it costs to produce? It doesn't write itself!
I use open source for a lot of things, but in many cases the functionality I need or the quality is not there. I'm not a developer, I don't wish to fix my own code. $100, or even $1000 is peanuts compared to the time I can spend chasing down dependencies or scouring forums for a solution instead of just referring to a nicely written manual or calling up tech support.
I'm not intending to bash open source, but to use it or not is not a case of whether one is "wise".
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