A dash of perspective on the "overpriced" software comments...

I've been writing software professionally for 14 years. In the last 4 or 5, we as an industry are getting bashed left and right by people who are convinced that - irrespective of how many hours we spend coding, testing, debugging and polishing something - because it's software, it should be either dirt cheap or free. Some people are making free software, and everyone else downloads it for free over KaZaa... why can't we just make all software free? (And while we're at it, can we all hold hands and sing Kum-bay-yah???)

Yes, some people philanthropically create free software products. My hat is off to them; they must either be coding in their free time or working for a non-profit. That doesn't mean the rest of us are greedy for wanting to get paid for our work. My time is worth money just like every other professional's time. If I do development work for someone else I expect to be compensated for my time and effort.

Yes, I sometimes see software and think it's overpriced. I've seen utilities that cause a light on a device to blink or not blink. Experience tells me that, for an experienced programmer, such a feature is - at most - 5 lines of code and a 10 second test. 2 minutes tops. $10 for that 2 minutes is overpriced for me. For someone who really wants that light to blink, maybe that's fair.

Creating a good word processor with all the trimmings, on the other hand, would take hundreds of hours of work. Why shouldn't a developer charge more for that? $50 for mobile software makes a lot of people cringe, but to me that's by far the fairer price of these two examples because as a developer, I know what went into creating that product... and I believe people deserve fair compensation for their efforts.

Most developers charge extremely fair prices for their work, both in terms of product quality and the time they spent. Truly. The public keeps us honest; no one except the really big guys can get away with outrageous prices, especially given the proliferation of good-quality freeware. In all honesty, most devs who write these mobile apps are giving away more in terms of their own time and energy than they can ever possibly recoup financially. By and large, they're doing it just for the love.

$0.02.