There was a fascinating pair of posts today (1, 2) on SquareOak about a new social networking auto-submit application he’s releasing for “free.” I think that his ‘application’ has major issues, but let’s focus on his business model for a moment: free versus paid.

[Update: fixed the names/links throughout. Whoops, sorry about that.]

My grandfather was a wise man, very quiet, and grew up on a farm. He knew what work was, and would never have confused what we do today with ‘real work.’ He used to tell me about getting up before dawn to milk cows so he could catch a train to university. He got pre-published on his dissertation a few months before defense and had to start over. He never believed in anything that didn’t cost money or sweat, it was just outside his frame of reference.

What does this have to do with yet another “free” service to save you time?

Well, free isn’t free if it takes more time than it saves. And it’s not free if you have to worry if it’ll disappear or gently break or just stop working because the author got a real job somewhere else. (Not talking about Brendan, I wouldn’t know him from Adam’s house cat, this is just a general statement.)

I know we all love Web 2.0 where someone using someone else’s money can take a run at, say, Adobe, and save us a lot of effort. Take PDF Hammer - they’re going to put PDF editing online. I just bought the upgrade to the new Adobe for $119 or whatever. I think my lifetime payment to these guys is well over $5K if you count CS2 and all that krep. So I am jazzed that someone is going to take VC money and put it all online for free.

On the other hand, if it is 3pm and I’m catching the 5:30 flight to LGA and I need to edit a PDF, who do I trust? And what is it worth?

Right.

So, this software, and all the other half (at best) solutions that are free are worth less to me than full solutions I have to pay for. Not to say that I don’t appreciate the free stuff. I even use it when it is not mission critical, but you get what you pay for in life, n’est ce pas?

Is “paid” software better than free? Well, I’m writing this on Mozilla running on XP and our servers run Linux and Oracle, so I’d say that you should pick and choose. But there is no doubt that if you’re going to depend on something you should have some influence and control. And there is no control over free software, so I always have to keep the backup, paid, controllable version around.