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Fargus's Avatar
Posts: 1,217 | Thanked: 446 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ Bedfordshire, UK
#114
Originally Posted by Rob1n View Post
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His time is obviously worth money, and that is easily quantifiable (hence the labour cost is often separated from the parts cost). His skills cannot easily be quantified though, and (similarly to software development), the cost has been invested already, so there's no marginal cost involved. Your example here equates to someone expecting you to write a program for free, rather than someone feeling they have the right to take a copy of a program you've already written. Again though, I'm not trying to claim that either of these are in any way justified.
This all comes down to whether the software sold is a right to use the software (service orientated) or commodity. As the only physical item involved in the transaction is the media then this becomes an issue. If you go for the service orientated approach this equates to one person in a street paying for cable subsrciption and then hooking everyone else up for free. The price paid was for the use of a service in a single instance, multiple uses therefore breaks the original representation.