Summary
The article by Mike Frichol correctly points out a number of market and economic factors that make the case for software vendors to give away their sw licences for free.
As a customer I would argue that such option would be harder than expected to sell.
Many corporate executives would soon come to the conclusion that there is no value in the licence. Hence such product should have no protection against copying, changing and modifying.
Still better to pay a quid.
Analysis
In most companies the procurement process of ICT products and services goes through the "technical" considerations of an IT department and the commercial negotiations conducted by Purchasing Department.
In most small-medium sized companies, specially where ICT spending is a small proportion of the overall procurement, buyers have limited focus on sw licensing. Thus their normal negotiation strategy aims at commoditizing the sw (hence maximizing the upfront discount) whilst conceding on a longer term "service" like that of sw maintenance.
This is one of the reasons why over the years the maintenance fees have gradually increased, and most extraordinarily have done so in the sw area, not so much in the hw. On the one hand IT people kept considering the sw maintenance fee as a "tax" with a very limited value attached, on the other purchasing people were happy to achieve "good deals" when buying new sw.
Now, if suddenly sw manufacturers were to offer their products for free, this would definitely confirm the value of a sw being the same as that of "real" commodities. That would also deprive purchasing people of one side of the equation (that of the upfront discount) and, next thing, they would start questioning real hard the sw maintenance fees. Over the short term customers would probably find a benefit in seeing their procurement costs go down, but over the medium term the industry as a whole would see a detriment in the amount of developments that currently go in sw.
At the end of the day as customer I would still prefer to pay "something", in order to place a real value on the product I am getting as sw.
