Time is money

“Linux is Free if Your Time is Worthless” (a line attributed to Jamie Zawinski)

When Larry Ellison says that the savings on licenses are no more than 10% of the total cost of ownership of software, I tend to believe him.

But if the cost of the license is 10%, you have to add another percentage for the time you can spend trying to make the software usable.

Here is an interesting example. John Loiacono, a senior executive at Adobe, tells on his blog the story of Eric Vreeland who, fed up with the incompatibilities and problems of a lot of open and free software, decided to invest the 2,500 dollars for the Creative Suite Master Collection, which includes 12 Adobe products, such as Photoshop, Premiere and Illustrator.

Indeed, in this case it works out better for Eric Vreeland to pay that money to guarantee the productivity he needs.

Many free software products are at a stage of development that simply doesn’t make them acceptable for professionals.

A lot of time can be spent trying to get these tools to work the way you are used to. The truth is that in these cases it’s better to spend the money and buy the licenses.

When you want things to work well, time is money, and if we are going to use free software we have to be careful: if you are used to a certain way of working, you have to understand that the free versions will not work the same.

But above all you have to look at how mature the software is. It’s good to compare and evaluate before buying or adopting a software product. That is a good recipe for really saving money.