Listics

Dave Winer says,

I’m so fed up with the supposed selflessness of programmers, while everyone gets paid for their work, and we’re left working our asses off for nothing. And the “no good deed goes unpunished” creed keeps getting worse and worse. It’s like the old days, when someone joked that the best way to drive Amazon to bankruptcy was to buy their product since they sold them at a loss. And then I realized it’s my fault. If I want to get paid, I have to stop working for free. People sometimes threaten you, Oh if you don’t give me the software for free I’ll use someone else’s. To which I say, okay with me. Inside that makes me laugh. I’m sure the programmer whose software you use for free is going to be real glad to hear from you.

There are a number of things that tickle me about Dave’s attitude. The first one is the “as-if” factor. If Dave says “we programmers work for free,” I’d have to say “as-if.” My impression of Dave is that he’s very market oriented, and this is a VERY good thing for an entrepreneur. Dave is an entrepreneur.

Dave may sometimes work to front-load a market with some product he’s hyped about. From RSS to OPML, Dave makes a buck crafting products and services in the open standards community for all of us to buy. Is he making any money on OPML? Maybe his return on that investment will be goodwill. Maybe others in the Winer constellation of products and service offerings will actually make the cash. Sometimes the returns for our contributions are less than tangible. Dave does a good job seeding the marketplace of ideas with his own.

But there’s a difference between writing to open standards and writing for free. In the old days, before Dave invented interoperability, programmers were salaried and they worked to add “goodness” to the systems they coded. Today, Dave thinks too many programmers are working for free, and where’s the goodness in that? And more to the point, where’s the profit? There remain many salaried programmers, and many of these are “open source” programmers, working for free in their spare time to add goodness to a common body of code. But among these, I would venture that many, perhaps even most, have an entrepreneurial vision, and they hope that the nifty little utility they’re developing or the skills they’re polishing can make them some money some day. Ultimately all of us would like to be compensated for what we produce.

Dave’s special message this morning, his marketing schtick, has to do with a new and special Dave Winer product that he calls Channel Z. When Sir Pings-a-lot is ready to unveil it and put a price point on it, the market will determine his new product’s value. Until then, it’s a secret I guess. But let’s help him with the buzz!

The other thing that tickles me about Dave is that he’s the kind of guy who can use a sentence like, “It’s like the old days, when someone joked that the best way to drive Amazon to bankruptcy was to buy their product since they sold them at a loss.” The subtext here is that the period marked by the emergence of Amazon is somehow the old days. Which in Internet time perhaps it was, but on the other hand, the concept of Internet time is a bit passe too, doncha think?