[HN Gopher] A world where people pay for software
___________________________________________________________________
A world where people pay for software
Author : robalni
Score : 204 points
Date : 2023-07-26 10:47 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (1sub.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (1sub.dev)
| ericls wrote:
| By "people" are you excluding organizations such as governments,
| corporations etc?
| robalni wrote:
| > By "people" are you excluding organizations such as
| governments, corporations etc?
|
| If you mean "people" as in "A world where people pay for
| software", then no.
|
| I think companies, especially software companies, would like to
| subscribe in this system if it gets big because if they have
| dependencies that require subscriptions, they probably don't
| want anything to get in the way for their employees.
| indymike wrote:
| Un-ironically, I make a living from people who pay for my
| software. I have for 30 years, as both a developer for hire, as
| an independent developer and even from royalties. It's not hard.
| Make something useful, make it well, place it where buyers can
| find it, and price it in a way that makes sense.
| rchaud wrote:
| Two models that weren't discussed:
|
| Sketch App - $99 once, $99/yr if you want upgrades (I did not)
|
| Wordpress model - Core is FOSS, money is made with custom plug-
| ins that can be priced freely.
| chadash wrote:
| The link doesn't talk about the SAAS model, which is probably the
| most profitable (and ubiquitous) one these days.
|
| I know people like to rail against it, but I actually like the
| SAAS model. It keeps incentives aligned. It used to be that I
| might shell out $200 for a piece of productivity software. Now, I
| might pay $10 a month instead. The thing is that under the old
| model, a company was incentivized by make a sale but retention
| didn't matter. Now, a sale is almost worthless, but retention is
| very valuable. Yes, over time I will pay much more with SAAS, but
| I also have companies that are incentivized to keep the software
| working. It doesn't matter that I have a perpetual license on
| accounting software I bought in 2005... it no longer functions
| with my operating system anyway. SAAS helps solve this problem.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| I think subscriptions would be more popular if you could manage
| subscriptions on the bank's end.
|
| How is it a company can give me recurring charges and I have no
| ability to turn them on or off?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I avoid saas precisely because of the subscription model.
| Occasionally, I need to make a flowchart, but I don't need to
| make flowcharts every month. I used to be able to pay for a
| flowchart software once, and then use it occasionally. Now it
| seems that, to get quality flowchart software, I have to pay
| monthly for something I don't use monthly. So instead, I find
| some free flowchart software which may or may not be limited in
| some way that I just deal with, and no one gets my money. Or
| maybe I find something with a buy-me-a-coffee link, but they
| would still get more from me if I could just buy a perpetual
| license for a reasonable price.
|
| Of course, the flowchart is just one example. The same can be
| said for a lot of utility software I only need occasionally.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yes. I have some audio waveform generation software I use
| only once in a long while. I paid about $50 for it almost 5
| years ago. If it were SaaS, I'd have paid a lot more than
| that over the last 5 years.
|
| A long time ago I worked out an agreement with a local gym.
| To avoid a membership that I would only need for a few months
| (I was living in a hotel temporarily with no access to my own
| equipment), I paid $10 each time I showed up. This could be a
| useful model for rarely-used software.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I paid $10 each time I showed up. This could be a useful
| model for rarely-used software._
|
| But it already is. Pay for a month and then cancel. Repeat
| each time you need it.
|
| I don't understand why people are assuming you have to pay
| continuously for years instead of just paying for the
| months you actually use.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| It's a bit frustrating having to "subscribe" and cancel
| almost everything. I barely signup to anything and I
| still forget that I'm subscribed to things.
|
| Companies are fully aware that many, many people forget
| about charges on their card and leech off those for
| extended periods.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Sure but it's also super cheap. That's the benefit.
| That's the tradeoff.
|
| And it's as easy as setting a calendar reminder.
|
| I do wish you could pay a month without auto renewal
| turned on, but it's also not a big deal. You can also
| often just cancel auto-renew immediately after paying, so
| no need even for a calendar reminder.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's constrained as to how it renders, but check out
| d2lang[0].
|
| [0] https://d2lang.com
| crazygringo wrote:
| Funny, your scenario to me seems like SAAS is an
| _improvement_.
|
| If I only use flowchart software 2x/yr, I can just pay those
| two individual months and nothing else. Six times over three
| years is way cheaper than buying it outright ever would have
| been. Plus after three years I'd be needing something that
| the newer version introduced anyways.
|
| So in your scenario SAAS saves a bunch of money and keeps
| your features and OS compatibility up to date.
|
| You just have to remember to cancel it once you're done each
| month, but that's easy enough with a calendar reminder.
|
| This way you get to save a lot of money over buying it
| outright.
| cudgy wrote:
| Some companies saw this issue by providing a read only
| client. The users can open files that they created but are
| not able to modify them without a subscription.
|
| By the way, if you are on Apple ecosystem, I recently tried
| the newly included Apple tool, Freeform, and found it to be
| surprisingly capable.
| zer8k wrote:
| SaaS works when not everything is atomized into micro-
| profitable businesses. The problem with SaaS is it enabled
| subscription hell and destroyed ownership. When I buy software
| I reasonably expect to _own_ my copy. No different than when I
| go to the store and buy a book, or buy a CD of music, or buy
| food. With SaaS I own nothing. My data is theirs. My stuff is
| theirs. It is no different than your example where software no
| longer works with your operating system. If you squint, you can
| see that once the company changes their model /raises their
| prices/etc it's no different than my software suddenly not
| working. The real difference is at least I only paid the _exact
| cost_ for my utility vs. 5, 10, or even 20x as much for the
| same utility.
|
| There is a dramatic difference between a world where some
| software is SaaS but most is owned vs. our current environment
| where everything is SaaS. It's the gestalt of the SaaS economy
| you have to look at and not the isolated cases.
|
| Moveover the issue isn't "productivity software" really. That
| _enhances_ your life. The fact I can 't even own some books,
| music, simple software, movies, etc is the problem. It creates
| an environment where the average person is tied down with so
| many subscriptions just for things they'd normally buy once
| that they become more poor than would be otherwise.
|
| I am at the point where piracy now makes more sense again and I
| will basically refuse to purchase any more software. To be
| honest, I don't care who it hurts. I am tired of being
| victimized by companies. One of the only software I pay for is
| the Jetbrains product suite because they are a company whose
| SaaS model is actually cooperative. Sublime is another one who
| has more than acceptable terms.
| hooverd wrote:
| You can add Alibre to that list. They do the JetBrains
| perpetual license plus N years updates for CAD software.
| nightski wrote:
| I feel it's the opposite. The incentive is to lock you in and
| provide as little value as possible for as much money as
| possible. Get you hooked, take your data hostage, and then jack
| up the price as much as possible while delivering little to no
| additional functionality. Bugs? who cares. Broken
| functionality? No big deal. You are locked in baby!
| lawn wrote:
| What exactly is the difference from paying up front?
|
| There there's even less incentives to fix bugs, fix broken
| functionality and god forbid new functionality.
| PeterisP wrote:
| With SAAS, if the software is barely usable but lacks
| competition, vendor gets paid even if they don't fix bugs
| or broken functionality. When paying up-front, there
| _always_ is competition - your own old version; so the
| vendor has strong financial motivation to make improvements
| since the recurring "maintenance" upgrade revenue is
| conditional on them, unlike in SAAS.
| labcomputer wrote:
| The difference is that with upfront payment developers are
| forced to actually add features that provide more utility.
| Otherwise customers don't upgrade. With SAAS you have to
| keep paying, even with if the software is completely static
| with no new features or bug fixes.
|
| As for bug fixes, do you think I am more or less likely to
| recommend your software to my friends if it is full of bugs
| and you don't fix them?
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| In the case of Sage, the difference was about 500% cost
| increase for each of my two small businesses.
| skydhash wrote:
| You buy what is offered (and a support period in most
| cases). Not a promise. No one buys a consumer car and
| expects it to run on water the next month.
| eastbound wrote:
| People totally buy Tesla and expects them to be self-
| driving next month. Every month since 7 years.
| [deleted]
| r00fus wrote:
| Where have you experienced data lockin? That sounds like poor
| SaaS strategies from the 2000s.
| zer8k wrote:
| Fusion 360 is one example off the top of my head.
| r00fus wrote:
| I think I would agree for large traditional software
| companies like Autodesk or Adobe that charged large sums
| for software versions you typically don't update yearly
| (Creative Cloud), that a flat subscription model seems to
| be a bad fit.
|
| Probably less so for software you use daily or make your
| living off of.
| zer8k wrote:
| I use a text editor daily. I see no revolutionary methods
| being added to text editing that could ever justify me
| paying monthly. Even something as simple as a calorie
| counter has a monthly charge for features that never
| change (MyFitnessPal).
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I don't think this is connected with reality. Most companies
| don't have such strong lock-in, and those that do often have
| extremely valuable products.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I dunno, this describes my reality pretty accurately.
| Apple, Figma, and Adobe all try to lock you in with cloud
| storage and proprietary storage formats: the more you
| invest in their products, the more you'd lose by not paying
| them. I used to run some websites off Squarespace, and
| there's no way to export them and move somewhere else, so
| you end up paying ~$200 a year to host a static web page,
| else recreate it from scratch. Gmail has me locked in by
| having all my emails from the last twenty years. Slack owns
| my conversation history with my friends. And so on...
|
| > those that do often have extremely valuable products.
|
| I agree with that. All those products above are valuable
| and useful to me. But, the price is not commensurate with
| the value of the product alone. The price only makes sense
| when you add both the value I get from using the product
| _and_ the pain I would experience by not using the product
| anymore. The product developers work hard not only to make
| the product useful, but also to punish you if you leave.
| That 's the gross part.
| conradfr wrote:
| You can connect an IMAP client to Gmail and retrieve all
| your emails.
| dizhn wrote:
| Which is something everybody should do before they remove
| that feature.
| teeray wrote:
| It reminds me of the dining hall at my university. The food
| would always be unbelievably good on parents weekend and any
| time there were tours that would eat there. Every other time
| it was mediocre at best. The check for the meal plan money
| cleared and the goal was to give back the bare minimum.
| greatwave1 wrote:
| I don't think that the incentive to "provide as little value
| as possible for as much money as possible" is in any way
| unique to the SAAS pricing model. Theoretically, every
| optimized pricing model will attempt to maximize revenue at a
| given value level.
|
| And in practice, what does "get you hooked, take your data
| hostage" mean? I can't think of many SAAS subscriptions in my
| personal life where this is a real issue.
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| Transition costs are prohibitive.
|
| Some SaaS platforms bill just enough to stay under the cost
| of transitioning to a competitor (or building first party)
| to maximize revenue.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| SaaS is DRM done right.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| If you pay every month and never own it, that's rent. The
| landlord will try and lock you in and extract value while
| providing as little as possible. Sometimes you get a good one
| that takes care of all the issues, but the majority just want
| their money.
|
| JetBrains figured this out already. Sell me a perpetual
| software license that I own and charge me separately to get the
| updates.
| ilyt wrote:
| Saas is a model that looks great for some cases but overall
| leads to shittification of many apps as the way it is often
| done, to make 100% sure nobody can just use a copy of a program
| they have, is by putting it in the cloud, which means higher
| costs to _them_ and worse experience to user (even the best web
| apps feel pretty laggy compared to native).
| jehb wrote:
| This has not been my experience at all with SaaS.
|
| I find SaaS products, including ones I have paid for, disappear
| at a much greater rate than the rate at which the desktop tools
| they replaced stop working.
|
| There's also next to nothing I can do as an end user when they
| do disappear. If I'm very lucky, I get a limited window to be
| able to export a portion of my data. But we've eroded data
| formats to the point where even if I can export my data, there
| might be nothing to plug it into. What good is a CSV, even,
| when what I need is a tool that processes the data in the CSV?
| There's no option for me to keep an old machine or a VM around
| and self-support on a discontinued piece of SaaS.
|
| That's to say nothing of the price hikes. $10 a month today
| becomes $14.99 next month, $17.99 in a year, and before you
| know it the proprietary system you've locked yourself into now
| costs five times what you originally paid. Sure, they might add
| some more features, but since it's SaaS, in many cases you have
| no choice to seek out a different vendor to provide the same
| feature, as again, your data is locked up in a format you can't
| easily extract and work with elsewhere.
| zzzzzzzza wrote:
| supabase model of open source + saas might be better?
| paulddraper wrote:
| That's true, but at the point that you have to fire up a VM
| to use some software... That's pretty niche
| steveBK123 wrote:
| SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable &
| maintained. The problem is all the flash in the pan ZIRP VC
| funded never-profit SaaS startups out there. Hopefully these
| get shaken out over the next couple years finally.
|
| For example, I've used Adobe products for a very long time,
| and they get a lot of flack. I was an extensive user of
| Photoshop (PS) and Lightroom (LR) for a long time.
|
| However, the old model was - PS pay $600 once, then $200 for
| updates every 2 years or so. LR was $200/100 as I recall. So
| your run-rate for both was over $150/year (factoring in the
| initial $800). This was in like year 2000 dollars.
|
| For $150 2023 dollars.. I get constant feature updates, cloud
| storage & sync, licensed to run on at least 2 machines, etc.
| Inflation adjusted this is nearly half the price of paying
| $150 in 2000.
|
| I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are
| unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share
| passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store in
| 1998 dollars. You can listen to basically every song you want
| for the year for the price of (inflation adjusted) 2.5 CDs
| purchased by my mallrat teenage self back then.
|
| I think we are all just very spoiled..
| ilyt wrote:
| > I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are
| unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share
| passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store
| in 1998 dollars. You can listen to basically every song you
| want for the year for the price of (inflation adjusted) 2.5
| CDs purchased by my mallrat teenage self back then.
|
| I'm willing to pay $10/mo to play music but that gets me
| access to near-all music I want access to, on all devices I
| use. A CD can be just in one place at once and needs a
| specific player. So it's a terrible comparison.
| hbn wrote:
| > I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are
| unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share
| passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store
| in 1998 dollars.
|
| Because everything is a recurring automatic charge to my
| credit card, and one more thing to try and keep track of
| and continually reevaluate if it's still valuable enough to
| me to continue paying for it.
|
| When you bought a CD you didn't have to from that point
| forward continue to think about if you want to continue
| paying money to have access to the CD.
| brickers wrote:
| I personally find the subscription model in some ways
| better in terms of cognitive load - choosing between
| concrete things can be paralysing enough that the two
| most likely outcomes are failing to make a choice or
| choosing something and regretting it. The sense of now
| owning something that I spent hard earned cash on can
| feel a burden if money gets tight.
|
| Subscriptions, on the other hand, match how consuming
| media feels to me - I spent time doing something I liked
| and the cost enabled that.
|
| Looking on it from a pure economics point of view,
| clearly it makes more sense to buy a CD and have access
| to it forever from that spend. But psychologically it
| feels very different
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| > SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable &
| maintained.
|
| _cough_ Pantone _cough_
| vbezhenar wrote:
| If I'm buying a lifetime thing, it's an investition. I
| spent money and got thing that will never get old. As time
| goes on, I'm getting more things and I need to spend less.
|
| If I'm buying a subscription, it's an obligation. I'll have
| to spend money from now until I die or I'll get reduced
| QoL.
|
| Even if today I have spare $200/month, that might not be
| the case tomorrow. Maybe I'll get fired. Maybe government
| turn my cash into paper. Maybe I'll have to pay everything
| I have to doctors to save my live or health. I'll still
| have bought songs, but I'll no longer have access to the
| streaming service.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Lifetime thing is a rather large statement, especially
| with software though isn't it? Most of the pre-
| subscription model compares were never lifetime
| purchases. Software that needed paid purchase update
| every 3-5 years to get OS support / features. No software
| I used in 1995 will run on my current computers. Even
| 2005 or 2010 is dubious in some cases.
|
| Content constantly changed delivery mechanisms and people
| had to buy new media/devices every 5-10 years VHS/Betamax
| -> Laserdisc -> DVD -> Bluray / HD-DVD -> Bluray 4K Vinyl
| -> 8 track -> Cassette -> CD
|
| For many things there are cheap/free alternatives or you
| can opt for the fixed cost up front version.
|
| Paper books/eBooks/CDs/DVDs/MP3s can still be purchased
| outright. Streaming services have ad supported free
| tiers. You can go to the library, turn on the radio or
| tune into over the air TV signal. You can buy an old
| version of photoshop/lightroom put it on an old computer,
| and don't expect updates. Etc.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Lifetime thing is a rather large statement, especially
| with software though isn't it? Most of the pre-
| subscription model compares were never lifetime
| purchases. Software that needed paid purchase update
| every 3-5 years to get OS support / features.
|
| For sufficiently valuable software, people will hold back
| on an older OS to keep using the software.
|
| A lot of high-end film scanners will come with the 68k or
| PowerPC mac that's used to run the software, because the
| alternative would be spending $20-30k for a new one. And
| industrial systems run on similar models.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > No software I used in 1995 will run on my current
| computers.
|
| Then I'm sorry you didn't play SimCity 2000 (-:
| radiator wrote:
| > No software I used in 1995 will run on my current
| computers.
|
| I don't think you have tried too much to run it.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Lifetime thing is a rather large statement, especially
| with software though isn't it? Most of the pre-
| subscription model compares were never lifetime
| purchases.
|
| You should hang around more in retro-gaming and retro-
| computing communities. They invest a lot of time, blood,
| sweat and tears to get to run some old software on modern
| devices, or preserve old computing/games devices that is
| able to run this software.
| ilyt wrote:
| When Saas software dies, your files die.
|
| When Boxed software dies, you run it on your emulator and
| your files can be read.
|
| > Content constantly changed delivery mechanisms and
| people had to buy new media/devices every 5-10 years
| VHS/Betamax -> Laserdisc -> DVD -> Bluray / HD-DVD ->
| Bluray 4K Vinyl -> 8 track -> Cassette -> CD
|
| You can still find VHS players. You can't get data from
| SaaS app that died yesterday
| watermelon0 wrote:
| > No software I used in 1995 will run on my current
| computers.
|
| I'd be surprised if many SaaS products from today will
| still be available in 28 years time.
|
| I'd assume that many 32bit programs from Win95 era still
| work natively on Windows 11, and for the rest (including
| 16bit and DOS programs) you can use compatibility layers
| (e.g. Wine) and emulators.
| waprin wrote:
| My hypothesis is not that people are spoiled but
| psychologically anchored.
|
| We buy thousands of items and for most people it's
| impossible to know how much something "should" cost. So we
| anchor our expectations to what we know.
|
| Web software was mostly free for years because it was
| either ad-supported or a speculative venture capital
| investment. Or a dev releasing it for free thinking that
| "if we get lots of users we can raise money and figure out
| monetization later". The Social Network came out in 2009
| and there's a scene where Zuckerberg was made to look like
| a genius for rejecting monetization. People who wanted to
| be like Zuckerberg made stuff for free then hoped to raise
| money. Finally add in many developers made software for
| free for personal or ideological reasons.
|
| The end result is that consumers are psychologically
| anchored to expect that web software "should" be free, an
| app "should" cost $1 at most, etc It's not really about the
| $10 as much as people don't like feeling ripped off and
| paying $10 for something that should cost nothing makes
| them feel ripped off.
|
| An experience is burned into my brain when a friend who was
| an aspiring yoga teacher was doing a Twitch stream for 10k
| viewers as part of an online festival but at the last
| moment needed to stream to Twitch from his iPhone. There
| was an app that worked perfectly that cost $15 but he
| almost sabotaged his whole show frantically searching the
| App Store for a free alternative because $15 was a ripoff.
| He caved eventually and unhappily, then to celebrate the
| stream led friends and family to a sushi restaurant that
| was $200/person . It was never about his inability to
| afford $15 but his psychological feeling that a $15 app is
| a ripoff. But fancy sushi "should" be expensive so $200 is
| a fair price.
|
| We are very slowly seeing this change as interest rates
| rise and everyone understands software monetization better
| but it's a gradual process. For whatever reason it's often
| devs themselves who push back the hardest against
| monetization, in their warped world view someone charging
| $10/mo for a SaaS is deeply unethical but going to work for
| some FAANG company and fighting hard to maximize TC is
| completely fine and in fact encouraged. That way your boss
| worries about monetization and you are free of any moral
| qualms about it. FAANG devs complaining about
| subscriptions, privacy , and paywalls are quite common and
| similar to vegetarians who only eat beef and pork but avoid
| eating cows or pigs.
| [deleted]
| m463 wrote:
| saas is antagonistic to customers
|
| It deliberately changes in the interests of the business at
| the expense of the customer.
|
| Updates are forced, cannot be backed out, lock in the
| customer, degrade privacy, remove features, upsell, and
| more.
|
| There needs to be a way to attract willing customers and
| maintain a respectful trustworthy relationship. Saas
| doesn't seem to do it.
| paulmd wrote:
| > I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are
| unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share
| passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store
| in 1998 dollars.
|
| I think when it was $10 or $15 a month for Netflix, and you
| got everything, that people did pay. The problem now is
| that it's $20 a month for Netflix, and $20 for Hulu, and
| $25 for Disney plus, and $20 for HBO (ahem, "Max!"), and
| $15 for Amazon, etc. Fragmentation has meant we're back to
| a cable bill worth of cost _on top of_ the actual internet
| (and possibly actual cable), and half the time you still
| can't watch the thing you want to watch (some seasons not
| currently in rotation etc).
|
| (Also, the cable model was driven by bundling, you may not
| watch a bunch of discovery channel or scifi channel
| personally but you're paying for them regardless. Most
| people didn't buy _that_ many optional extras, maybe an
| extra movie channel or sports or something, but, most
| people were never racking up $100 of ala carte services
| either. A lot of people would have spent a lot less on
| cable tv if they were allowed to unbundle.)
|
| Anyway the "piracy is an availability problem" line isn't
| always true. A lot of times it's a price problem too. Even
| if Super Netflix came out with actually everything on it
| for $99 a month I don't think you'd get a lot of takers.
| There is a number where it's worth my time to pirate even
| if it's _available_ , it's not like Best Buy didn't carry
| music or movies pre-iTunes/Netflix, and you could always
| buy esoteric bands on the web etc. Netflix solved
| availability _for $10 /month_ and that last part can't be
| severed while retaining the truth of the insight.
|
| You might say it's not just steam that ended piracy, but
| _steam sales_ , and as they've slowed down so has my
| proclivity to spend. I'll buy any old crap at $5 or $10 if
| it looks fun, and throw it on the backlog, but for $30 or
| $40 it has to be something I'm specifically interested in
| playing in the near future.
|
| This summer sale was the first time prices have been decent
| in a long while, for the last 5 years the discounts have
| been meager and the base prices remained pretty high. 75%
| off a game you're still trying to get $60 for 3-5 years
| after launch isn't exactly the deep discount it's presented
| as. Konami and Capcom are awful about this.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > The problem is all the flash in the pan ZIRP VC funded
| never-profit SaaS startups out there.
|
| The thing is those startups sometimes make very useful
| software while they're around. I ran Sparrow (an email
| client from > 10 years ago) for years after the company
| that made it was shuttered and acquired by Google. If
| Sparrow was a SaaS product it would be gone 30 days after
| the acquisition was announced.
|
| > SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable &
| maintained.
|
| I'm sure many other users have noticed this too. I wonder
| if it makes breaking into the software space as an upstart
| firm harder than "in the old days".
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable &
| maintained.
|
| Google is infamous for shutting down services. And the same
| thing regularly happens even to large companies when they
| get acquired by even larger companies who then shut down
| their existing services and try to force migrate everyone
| to the parent's offering.
|
| Conversely, stalwarts like Oracle and IBM will often
| continue providing a service indefinitely. For a price.
| Because once you're locked in they're happy to keep taking
| your money. All of your money. Forever. This is...
| differently terrible?
|
| > the old model was - PS pay $600 once, then $200 for
| updates every 2 years or so.
|
| But many people would just keep using the original version
| indefinitely. Paying $800 once is a lot less than paying
| $150/year until you die. It also lets you choose whether
| you want to pay more for the new features or save money
| because you don't need them.
|
| And you can't use the Consumer Price Index for software
| because software inflation is negative. As more people get
| computers over time the size of the market increases but
| the fixed cost of developing the software is the same, so
| the amortized unit cost goes down and in a competitive
| market that gets passed on to the customer. In the 90s
| people paid money for Unix and zip utilities and web
| browsers and now they're all free because they have such a
| big market that the unit cost is effectively zero.
|
| SaaS things remain not because they don't follow the same
| cost structure but because lock-in through proprietary
| formats and training costs and migration costs keep people
| stuck on the thing they started with, which in turn keeps
| competitors from achieving the scale needed to get prices
| down.
| ilyt wrote:
| > But many people would just keep using the original
| version indefinitely. Paying $800 once is a lot less than
| paying $150/year until you die. It also lets you choose
| whether you want to pay more for the new features or save
| money because you don't need them.
|
| The way around that was to change file format so if
| you're in industry using that file format (say .PSD
| Photoshop files), at some point you won't be able to open
| files from your clients...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| But that was also a risk, because then companies would
| standardize on the _old_ version because they didn 't
| want to send files their business partners couldn't open.
| It also opened the door to a competitor because if you're
| going to make a compatibility-breaking change anyway...
| jwells89 wrote:
| Proprietary file formats are also a problem.
|
| Sure, you can get versions of your data that are technically
| usable/readable by other software out of Google Docs or
| Figma, but you'll never have a fully fleshed out original
| because nothing else can read those formats because they're
| not documented and can change at the whim of their creators.
| j45 wrote:
| Part of the issue with SaaS is when they're rushed to build
| using the "fastest" technologies or platforms. Then, when
| they get bigger, they end up having a much higher break even
| burden.
|
| Building with boring technology on the other hand can remain
| very low in monthly costs and still provide a lot of scale
| and capacity for users.
| smeyer wrote:
| Were people actually paying $200 for a piece of productivity
| software, though? I'm no expert but sort of got the impression
| that a lot of the consumer-facing software currently charging
| $10 a month used to retail for 2 figures, not 3.
| abmackenzie wrote:
| I'm a bit confused - you subscribe to one developer, and then get
| the benefit of being subscribed to all?
|
| What's the incentive for a developer to sign up to this then, if
| they don't get a share of your subscription when you use their
| service? Isn't this a bit like asking Disney+ to give all Netflix
| subscribers access with no compensation?
| robalni wrote:
| The difference this is supposed to make is that currently most
| people don't pay for free software. I don't for example. That
| is because I don't need to. This system is supposed to make
| more people pay, which should mean that all developers get more
| money. Giving access to someone who subscribes to someone else
| is part of what makes this work and if the developers can
| accept that, they should all benefit from it.
| abmackenzie wrote:
| But I don't get any $ from it unless they sign up on MY site,
| right? Since there's no sharing mechanism.
|
| So I don't see how joining in would benefit me - if anything
| I'd lose a bit of revenue from people who would have paid and
| now find they don't need to because they're signed up for
| some other product which I have no hand in and no revenue
| from?
| robalni wrote:
| > But I don't get any $ from it unless they sign up on MY
| site, right? Since there's no sharing mechanism.
|
| Exactly.
|
| > So I don't see how joining in would benefit me - if
| anything I'd lose a bit of revenue from people who would
| have paid and now find they don't need to because they're
| signed up for some other product which I have no hand in
| and no revenue from?
|
| It would not benefit you if the average person paid for
| multiple free software projects. In that case, they would
| only have to pay for one instead of multiple.
|
| I don't think that's the case though, so this solution
| should make more people pay for free software and that
| should benefit the developers on average.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Sounds like Patreon with extra steps. May or may not be a good
| idea.
| blueyes wrote:
| People pay for scarcity, not utility. In economics, this is
| expressed as the water-diamond paradox. Software makers simply
| need to find ways to make some piece of what they sell scarce
| (managed workloads). Everything else depends on the conspicuous
| consumption of idealists; ie it doesn't scale.
| coxley wrote:
| > # Developers
|
| > Sorry, there are no developers to subscribe to currently.
|
| If you actually want adoption, more needs done than posting the
| thing you built and suggesting people use it. Building effective,
| self-sufficient marketplaces is tough. Benefit has to be seen on
| both sides from the get-go.
| slim wrote:
| I'm baffled by the fact the developer did not put himself on
| that list
| ajkjk wrote:
| My question is: why isn't there yet a thing (or is there?) that
| works like AWS, but has the UX experience of a smartphone: you
| can install "apps" on it -- which you pay for hosting / bandwidth
| -- and it handles integration with all your devices, while
| leaving you in charge of how they're configured and what happens
| with the data?
|
| Sorta like expanding the mobile phone experience to encompass
| your whole internet experience, so you can choose what services
| you use, and where they're hosted, and those two things are
| fundamentally decoupled.
|
| One such app could be a sort of 'charge card' for websites, which
| would pay them pennies, or larger tips if you like, instead of
| having to see ads.
|
| Another might be a connection to a search engine which allows you
| to tailor _your_ search experience instead of it being optimized
| in e.g. Google's interests with all the commercial stuff at the
| top.
| blowski wrote:
| Successful apps have more to lose from being on such an
| ecosystem than they stand to gain. It's why so much software
| starts out as wanting to be open, dominates the market, then
| puts up the garden walls.
|
| The closest we have to this is app stores - and look how
| everyone moans about them.
| goplayoutside wrote:
| Do you mean something like Cloudron or PikaPods or SandStorm?
| "Self-hosting as a Service".
|
| Kagi solves the conflict of interest aspect of search engines
| like Google. (No affiliation, just a satisfied early adopter.)
| derefr wrote:
| Kind of, but it should be vertically integrated between
| "cloud" and "edge" and "home-network" and "mobile." With all
| of that being either resources you own, or resources you're
| personally billed for, directly by the providers (though
| aggregated per app), with no ability for the app to extract
| rents on the costs of those resources (i.e. you're not paying
| the app so that the app in turn pays for the resources;
| you're being billed by the "cloud" and "edge" providers
| directly.)
|
| If you install e.g. a Photos app, then that'd be a viewer app
| + cache on your phone; a bounded-size cache on your NAS or
| ISP gateway-router; a thumbnailing and face-detection
| background worker started in your ISP's edge DC; and a
| primary store in some cloud.
|
| If you install e.g. Minecraft, then the server for that game
| will dynamically reposition itself (and migrate its data)
| between running embedded on device, vs. on appliance-compute
| on your home network, vs. on your ISP's edge-compute, vs. on
| the cloud -- depending on whether you're playing single-
| player, vs. multiplayer with someone else on the same
| network, vs. at least one player being elsewhere in your
| region, vs. people connecting all over the world. (And, of
| course, when nobody is connected to it, the server should
| quiesce to just being dead state and then gradually have that
| state "evict upward" toward the cloud.)
|
| IMHO a major part of this would be getting ISPs to sell
| commodity edge-compute power to OS vendors, both in-DC _and_
| in-home-network (presumably by putting addressable
| application processing capability into ISP gateway routers.)
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > My question is: why isn't there yet a thing (or is there?)
| that works like AWS, but has the UX experience of a smartphone:
| you can install "apps" on it -- which you pay for hosting /
| bandwidth -- and it handles integration with all your devices,
| while leaving you in charge of how they're configured and what
| happens with the data?
|
| Heroku?
| ajkjk wrote:
| Not at all. I can't "install a cloud storage app on my Heroku
| and then access it on my phone" without significant technical
| skills. As an engineer I could figure it out, but I won't,
| because I don't want to deal with that. Instead I will
| fantasize about how it ought to work.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Maybe https://sandstorm.io/ then?
| ilyt wrote:
| Coz that's a lot of work to make and someone needs to pay for
| it.
|
| In world when people would rather throw another $5/mo on
| another single service doing the thing.
|
| I do think it might've been pretty popular if the experience
| was truly seamless but _that takes a lot_
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I want a plug-and-play way to install services like (front-
| ends) BreezeWiki, Rimgo, Nitter, and Invidious, and (self-
| hosted) Miniflux, Gitea, a centralized Syncthing node, and an
| image sync tool (possibly Immich), onto an old laptop I own,
| without messing with users, groups, AUR builds, upgrading
| between Postgres versions... like a world where sandstorm.io
| had taken off. Then access them on any of my devices, like
| Tailscale but without binding arbitration and a class action
| waiver...
| pzo wrote:
| Haven't tried this project yet but my plan is to buy cheap hp
| elitedesk / dell optiplex thin client and just install
| umbrelOS [0] that has app store with many of those apps such
| as: homebridge, home assistant, pihole, trailscale, gitea,
| syncthing, vaultwarden, nextcloud etc.
|
| [0] https://umbrel.com/
| kykeonaut wrote:
| I am of the idea that software should be free, but software
| development should be for profit.
| [deleted]
| rizky05 wrote:
| [dead]
| elemos wrote:
| How does this work?
| playingalong wrote:
| Not OP, but I think they want the software to be FLOSS, but
| if you want some feature/change you pay (the maintainers) to
| have it done.
| kykeonaut wrote:
| Yep, as well as charging for support and consulting.
| Anything that has to do with developers'/maintainers' time
| should not be expected to come for free in FOSS projects.
| Unless the devs are happy to do such work for free ofc.
| samsquire wrote:
| If I spend time on work that provides value to others, I would
| like it to be able to pay my living costs so I can keep doing
| that work that I enjoy.
| a254613e wrote:
| Besides being sick of subscriptions for every small thing, I'm
| not sure I understand the premise here:
|
| "Pay to download or for other services: Not worth it; users can
| find the software somewhere else and they don't need your other
| services."
|
| So users won't pay a one-time fee, but instead they will pay a
| subscription to get that one software they need? They won't "find
| the software somewhere else" if it's behind a subscription, but
| will do so if it's behind a single payment?
| robalni wrote:
| The thing is that this solution scales better. If you had to
| pay all developers individually, that would not be worth it but
| with my solution, you have to pay only one.
|
| Also, it doesn't have to be a subscription. The payment is 100%
| up to the developers that you pay, so they could sell a one
| time payment and register a lifetime subscription in this
| system for that.
| [deleted]
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| If I understand correctly, you are not getting one piece of
| software. You get access to everything in their library, like a
| spotify subscription. You also choose which developer gets your
| $5 or whatever, so you retain the meritocratic infrastructure
| that a traditional marketplace provides.
| NickNaraghi wrote:
| Now that you mention it, the spotify subscription is actually
| very interesting here. A bundled subscription for all the
| software you use could make sense (though it would probably
| by 10-100x the cost of a spotify subscription).
|
| However, OP's resource allocation model (each user determines
| which developer gets their payment) doesn't make sense to me.
| I think it would be better to prototype multiple resource
| allocation models in parallel and see which are most fair and
| sustainable over time.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| next to nobody will pay 100x a spotify subscription for
| anything, no matter how great it is. Despite what buisness
| owners like to believe, most normal people in the first
| world have like $100 dollars a month total after food +
| rent + utilities with which to spend on any and all
| entertainment and luxuries. at best you could maybe charge
| like 60 dollars a month, like cable, but that would have to
| be an unbelievable deal with no alternative (not possible,
| its incredibly easy to make new software, so you'd
| constantly be undercut by startups and open source chipping
| away at your cataloge)
|
| I could maaaaaybe see it working on iphone, a premium apps
| service, where they have a lot more control
| joshstrange wrote:
| SetApp is pretty much that (for Mac, I don't know if they
| also do Windows stuff). I've avoided it and instead bought
| a lot of software available in the bundle because I prefer
| to own the software when I can and when it makes sense.
| andy99 wrote:
| How do you prevent or discourage the rise of "influencer
| developers"? The problem with subscriptions as a solution is that
| they end up being a popularity contest. That's not necessarily
| bad, if people want to spend their money that way but it doesn't
| solve the global problem of paying for those who write software.
| If it takes off it will just mean more Lex Fridman types get a
| big subscriber base, and a bunch more try and emulate that model.
| If fact I think it could easily distract a lot of people from
| focusing on writing software.
| robalni wrote:
| I know that is a possible problem. Partially, that problem
| exists with everything; advertisements make people buy from the
| most popular brands even if they are not the best. Other than
| that, the developers in this cooperation have to trust each
| other so if someone is just popular and doesn't make any good
| software, they would not be accepted by the other developers to
| join.
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| >doesn't make any good software
|
| What if the person does make decent software, but is a huge
| influencer?
|
| Why not opt for the Spotify model? Usage = money. Why turn
| this into a popularity contest?
| robalni wrote:
| > What if the person does make decent software, but is a
| huge influencer?
|
| Then they would probably be able to make more money selling
| subscriptions than other developers that are less known. I
| don't know how different that would be though from if they
| sold physical products. One important thing here is that
| there is a limit to how many subscriptions one developer
| can sell. This is done to emulate physical products as much
| as possible.
|
| Also, they would probably sell the subscriptions for a
| higher price than other developers, since they can, which
| would mean that people who don't know about that person
| would buy from someone who is cheaper.
|
| > Why not opt for the Spotify model? Usage = money. Why
| turn this into a popularity contest?
|
| That means there has to be usage statistics collection in
| all software. Since the software has to be open source,
| that could be abused a lot, including removed. I also don't
| like the idea of having any requirement like that on the
| software. It would for example require that the software
| has access to the internet which doesn't work well for some
| software.
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| > I don't know how different that would be though from if
| they sold physical products
|
| I mean that's the literal point of this website, no? In
| the real world, a sale is a sale. Imagine going into
| BestBuy, leaving $100 at the front, telling the clerk to
| put it all into Sony (because Sony is 4 cool kidz) and
| then just grabbing a nVidia graphics card and Apple
| AirPods.
|
| > One important thing here is that there is a limit to
| how many subscriptions one developer can sell.
|
| Definitely interested in seeing how this will play out.
| Sounds like a recipe for either (a) a super cool, tightly
| nit community with high quality contributers who care
| about their software or (b) a dump for software which
| woudlnt cut it in the real world market.
|
| >Also, they would probably sell the subscriptions for a
| higher price than other developers, since they can, which
| would mean that people who don't know about that person
| would buy from someone who is cheaper.
|
| My game theory senses are tingling. Why would I
| incentivize people into buying other people's
| subscription while gaining access to my stuff?
|
| >That means there has to be usage statistics collection
| in all software.
|
| You could always implement it on your end, right? Could
| be download based, or whatever. A one time thingy.
| robalni wrote:
| > I mean that's the literal point of this website, no? In
| the real world, a sale is a sale. Imagine going into
| BestBuy, leaving $100 at the front, telling the clerk to
| put it all into Sony (because Sony is 4 cool kidz) and
| then just grabbing a nVidia graphics card and Apple
| AirPods.
|
| Ok, I see what you mean now. I think the distribution of
| who gets the money in 1Sub would be similar to donations,
| with two remedies:
|
| - The owner of the paywall that made you subscribe gets a
| 10 credits bonus as described in [0]. This will lead to
| more money to the people who make the things that you
| actually try to use.
|
| - If someone is popular, they will either run out of
| subscriptions to sell, or they will sell them at a higher
| price. In either case that makes it possible for the less
| known developers to sell more subscriptions.
|
| [0] https://1sub.dev/about/how-it-works
| cbovis wrote:
| More usage doesn't necessarily equate to more value when it
| comes to software, you could easily argue the opposite.
| badtension wrote:
| I'd encourage a strong "progressive tax" that could for example
| follow the power law: you get log(x) of what your influence is.
| Getting to 1x (let's say a median pay in a given country)
| should be pretty easy but to get something like a $1M you would
| have to make software used on a massive scale.
|
| Whatever revenue you generated that is above what you got paid
| would go towards the less "lucrative" projects and maintainers
| keeping the open source going.
| ozim wrote:
| I have a different take on the topic.
|
| People should not pay for software - average Joe should have all
| kinds of software basically free.
|
| Now you ask "who should pay for development", corporations,
| companies or foundations where people still could donate but
| would not have to. Where corporations and companies pay salaries
| and provide end users with services.
|
| Solo devs should not write and maintain anything without getting
| paid.
|
| Yes it is "corporate dystopia" but on the other hand when I see
| all kinds of rants or horror stories from OSS maintainers and
| companies that don't want to contribute it seems only reasonable
| way. Corporation/Company/Foundation pay salaries for devs and
| provide people with software while charging for services like
| keeping data or any other actual services that can be connected
| to software they provide or in case of foundations by donations.
| ativzzz wrote:
| This is like the musician problem. There are so many people
| willing to play for pretty much nothing or for free that it's
| very hard for the average musician to make money. On the
| consumer side, why should you always pay for music when so many
| people are doing it for free? There's an oversupply of eager
| musicians making music
|
| Same with OSS development. Why should you pay for something if
| people just do it for free? Doesn't matter who the consumer is.
|
| > Solo devs should not write and maintain anything without
| getting paid.
|
| But they do, and they will regardless. And until they stop,
| nothing will change. There's an oversupply of eager coders
| coding for free
|
| Companies will pay (their own developers) once the OSS solution
| doesn't work or needs extra extensions that doesn't exist.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| > But they do, and they will regardless. And until they stop,
| nothing will change. There's an oversupply of eager coders
| coding for free
|
| There's no thriving market of OSS apps for iOS.
|
| So the solution is simple. Charge some money from developer
| to allow distribution of his apps. This seem to kill open
| source attitude very well.
| islammidov wrote:
| I believe software eating the world (and will continue to do so)
| exactly because of how it's paid now. Not sure that much
| innovation needed here
| meatjuice wrote:
| Won't this just accelerate the reinventions of wheels that's
| happening everywhere on the Internet?
| dboreham wrote:
| In the spirit of throwing random ideas at the wall to see what
| sticks, this is fine. But it's obviously not going to work.
| andruby wrote:
| I don't understand the "economic" model.
|
| If I'm a developer and get to chose what to charge, that means I
| can ask people for $0.01, and they would get access to everything
| from all developers of this "platform"?
|
| The example on [0] where a developer pays credits when they get a
| subscriber is confusing. Should Devs "top up" somehow?
|
| [0] https://1sub.dev/about/how-it-works
| robalni wrote:
| > If I'm a developer and get to chose what to charge, that
| means I can ask people for $0.01, and they would get access to
| everything from all developers of this "platform"?
|
| You can do that but you will not make a lot of money that way.
| The number of subscriptions you can sell is limited so if you
| sell all of them for $0.01 you will probably wish you had asked
| for more and when you have sold out, only the more expensive
| subscriptions sold by other developers remain and they will
| make more money than you.
|
| > The example on [0] where a developer pays credits when they
| get a subscriber is confusing. Should Devs "top up" somehow?
|
| I don't know exactly what you mean by "top up" but the credits
| are turned into subscriptions when sold. This is how we make
| sure the developers can't sell infinite subscriptions. The plan
| is then that with time, the developers will get more credits so
| that they can sell more subscriptions. How fast they will get
| more could depend on the current value of their account, where
| the value could be calculated from the credits and the number
| of subscribers they have.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > How fast they will get more could depend on the current
| value of their account, where the value could be calculated
| from the credits and the number of subscribers they have.
|
| So are you then implicitly setting the price yourself because
| anyone who doesn't charge enough can't get more credits?
|
| Suppose someone develops an app which takes hardly any effort
| to make -- it's a hundred lines of code -- but it does
| something common that everybody needs so if available for
| $0.01 it would have a hundred million users. Which would
| gross a million dollars and more than pay for the development
| of the simple app, so the developer is satisfied with that.
| But to do that you'd have to let them sell a hundred million
| subscriptions for $0.01 each.
|
| Now let's go toward the other end of the spectrum. Some app
| which is specialized and requires a million dollars of
| developer time but only has a market of 10,000 customers.
| Those customers would pay $100 each for it, if they had to,
| but not if they can buy into the system somewhere else for
| $10 (or $0.01) instead.
|
| In general, who is going to buy a fungible subscription for
| significantly more than it's available somewhere else? How do
| you handle the fact that the development cost of a thing
| isn't proportional to the number of people who use it?
| robalni wrote:
| > So are you then implicitly setting the price yourself
| because anyone who doesn't charge enough can't get more
| credits?
|
| Everyone can get more credits. The idea is that when we
| think we need more subscriptions to sell, every developer
| would get a number of additional credits that is
| proportional to the number of credits they have (with
| active subscriptions converted to credits for the
| calculation).
|
| > But to do that you'd have to let them sell a hundred
| million subscriptions for $0.01 each.
|
| That would be very difficult for them to do since the
| number of subscirptions they can sell is limited by how
| many credits they have.
|
| > Some app which is specialized and requires a million
| dollars of developer time but only has a market of 10,000
| customers.
|
| If you make software for only a few people and you need a
| lot of money then I don't think this system is for you. It
| is mostly for developers who make software for everybody.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Everyone can get more credits. The idea is that when we
| think we need more subscriptions to sell, every developer
| would get a number of additional credits that is
| proportional to the number of credits they have (with
| active subscriptions converted to credits for the
| calculation).
|
| This is what I mean by implicitly setting the price. You
| set it indirectly by rate limiting the number of
| subscriptions.
|
| A service with high cost and low volume gets priced out,
| even if it's only somewhat above average, because people
| can buy a subscription from someone else for less.
|
| Conversely, if subscriptions are rate limited then no one
| has any incentive to sell them for less than the market
| rate, which is in turn set by supply and demand (and you
| having your hand on the supply knob). Why would anyone
| charge less, or pay more, than the median price?
|
| Then anyone who needs more than that is priced out, and
| if you allocate credits based on how many people sign up
| or use a service, the service that provides only trivial
| value but to a large number of people gets a ton of
| credits disproportional to the value of their service.
| picadores wrote:
| I wonder, if the "tax-funded" model could work for software. The
| state raises money from the public, but the public determinates
| directly via usage (minutes spend with), usefullness (money
| gained) how much of that tax goes to what developer. Cut out the
| monopoly buisness middle man, but also remove any political moral
| meddlers in various "round tables" as they are omni present in
| public media systems.
|
| The idea has problems though. How to pay for background
| ("invisble" layers). How to prevetn "hyper transparent citizens".
| Etc.
| xtreme wrote:
| Minutes spent is a horrible metric. It creates a perverse
| incentive to intentionally slow down the software.
| dbrueck wrote:
| A root of the problem is using economic models for physical items
| with digital goods and services.
|
| IMO the most sensical low level* economic model for digital
| things would be one where you pay a really tiny amount every time
| you _derive value_ from something. A fraction of a penny each
| time you play a song, each time you edit an image in some
| software, each time you visit a website.
|
| There are a boatload of obstacles to getting to a model like
| this, but as a thought exercise it's really interesting to
| consider an alternate universe where this model got established
| instead of, say, everything being ad-based. Not only would it
| provide a model for monetizing software, it would also for
| example completely reframe DRM (making it both far more
| ubiquitous but also far less antagonizing to the user, since it
| would be aligned with what the user is trying to do instead of
| being at odds with it).
|
| * The idea being that this low level economic would exist but for
| practical reasons (like overcoming human psychology) you might
| need to overlay a higher level model like a monthly "unlimited
| consumption" subscription or tax.
| myk9001 wrote:
| This is basically the idea that motivated "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-
| Peer Electronic Cash System"[^1]
|
| "The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting
| the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the
| possibility for small casual transactions [...]"
|
| And more recently Brave, the browser tried to implement it.
|
| "Crypto and DeFi are hard to use and the $330 billion digital
| advertising industry is failing users, publishers and
| advertisers. With Basic Attention Token and Brave we want to
| take Crypto to the next 1B users and solve the endemic
| inefficiencies and privacy violations hobbling the digital ad
| industry."[^2]
|
| I personally think this is a beautiful idea, had it worked out
| as envisioned, the Internet could've been a very different and
| likely better place now. Pity cryptocurrencies came to be what
| they're in their present condition.
|
| ---
|
| [^1]: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
|
| [^2]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Interesting to think about. However, for that to be feasible I
| believe the draconian "copyright forever" laws would have to
| have never happened. I'm against paying rent to corporations to
| access the work of dead people on principle. Or past say, fifty
| years even if they lived.
| dbrueck wrote:
| I think I'm in the same boat as you, but can you articulate
| the 'why' behind that sentiment? (saying it's "on principle"
| could also be a way to not have to address that question,
| haha)
|
| As in, if someone created something and you derive value
| (utility, enjoyment, etc.) from it, what is the basis for at
| some point no longer providing compensation for that utility?
|
| FWIW, I haven't come up with a completely convincing answer,
| and yet I still feel like you do! Maybe there is no firm
| justification for terminating compensation, but instead it's
| more of an idea instilled by the culture, that after X years,
| the thing you created becomes owned by society at large just
| for the greater good, or maybe in recognition that your work
| came about because of prior accomplishments from others, or
| that as a society we want ongoing creativity and not
| stagnation.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > However, for that to be feasible I believe the draconian
| "copyright forever" laws would have to have never happened.
|
| This argument assumes that you are lawful, in opposite to
| chaotic, on the ethical axis (see https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki
| /pmwiki.php/Main/CharacterAlignme...).
| frithsun wrote:
| > imagines a sally struthers charity commercial, but with random
| hipsters and nerds staring sadly at the camera, hoping that
| somebody, somewhere, will pay them as much money as they think
| they deserve
| [deleted]
| grodes wrote:
| Pay to download or for other services: Not worth it; users can
| find the software somewhere else and they don't need your other
| services. ... The user subscribes to a developer of their choice
| and in return, all developers (and everyone else who wants to)
| can give that user some kind of benefit, like giving them access
| to downloads
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| >users can find the software somewhere else
|
| and what happens when you release a new version? someone will
| have to be the first to pay, and most people who want to
| immediately upgrade will also pay the day it's released instead
| of waiting for some sketchy dude to upload the executable
| somewhere else
| haunter wrote:
| So video games right now in 2023?
| intrasight wrote:
| I like Yale University and Oracle Corporation's model: "How much
| do you make? Give us 10%"
| TheMode wrote:
| Why do we insist on making software paid? Wouldn't it make more
| sense to work toward making software more stable so I could
| decide to make a calculator app during my free time, and have it
| somehow still used 200y later?
|
| Software is stupidly simple to distribute, but for some reason
| one of the hardest to keep. Obviously if we cannot use any
| software of the past, we are stuck with developers having to
| maintain old or new solutions.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Software is stupidly simple to distribute
|
| Society is spending billions of dollars each year for working
| on complex hardware and software to make that distribution
| possible. Physical goods are the stupidly simply thing to
| distribute.
| TheMode wrote:
| There is intrinsic complexity involved in distributing
| physical goods. Software complexity is mostly made up.
|
| Would billions solve software distribution & longevity? How?
| neerajdotname2 wrote:
| Inspite of all the competition the SAAS pricing is not coming
| down. There are around 30 calendly alterntatives. However if you
| check the price of these alternatives they are not too far from
| what the market leader is charging. More on this at
| https://blog.neeto.com/p/neetocal-a-calendly-alternative-is.
| samsquire wrote:
| This is timely, I recently commented about paying for software
| [0], professional software is very expensive, but it's very
| expensive to create.
|
| There's thankless work such as programming language development,
| operating systems (Linux), databases and Linux distributions that
| are profoundly valuable. Even just wrangling them from a devops
| perspective is painful though.
|
| I've never paid for any of the work that went into Ubuntu, Python
| or Java (I use Corretto) or MySQL or C.
|
| I kind of want a community of people that help run a sideproject
| PaaS and solve the things I would prefer not to work on. Servers
| that are up-to-date and patched and scalable and robust.
|
| I use OmniNotes on my Android phone, I use FreeFileSync, Typora
| (paid software), IntelliJ Community.
|
| What's a price that you would pay pay for your open source
| software?
|
| If it was like Spotify, spotify is like $9.99 a month and
| apparently 210 million susbcribers according to Bing search
| "spotify number of subscribers". That's a fair amount of people's
| living costs to pay for.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36827698
| ochoseis wrote:
| > I've never paid for any of the work that went into Ubuntu,
| Python or Java (I use Corretto) or MySQL or C.
|
| You've almost certainly paid for them, just not directly. Some
| share of the cost in the supply chain that delivers you goods
| and services will inevitably end up with the large enterprises
| who sponsor or develop those projects.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| by eliminating all actors on the stage and referring solely
| to "large enterprises", welded unequivocally to ".. who pay
| for this" the entire ecosystem is reduced to absurd
| oversimplification. It is both insulting to the others who
| participate, and bone-headed wrong about where "resources"
| come from in this unusual, modern ecosystem.
| ochoseis wrote:
| The assertion was that even if it doesn't feel like it, you
| support open source indirectly.
|
| It was not that all funding or contributions are made by
| large enterprises.
|
| I applaud efforts to more directly support projects that
| give you utility. It's becoming easier for individuals to
| do that (as evidenced by the article).
| leetrout wrote:
| Sounds similar to Setapp but with a broader audience / goal
|
| https://setapp.com/
| chime wrote:
| Absolutely love Setapp and it was the first thing I thought of
| when I saw this. The video streaming equivalent of this is
| Nebula.
| leo150 wrote:
| SetApp is amazing, I'm using it on all my devices. It macOS,
| some apps are also available on iOS.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Computers have an unprecedented ability to reproduce value for
| free. Programmers need a relatively fixed amount of resources to
| thrive. (The value of resources varies by location but we all
| need things like food, shelter, transportation, clothing, tools,
| etc etc)
|
| If we can find a way to make sure every person has what they need
| to thrive regardless of their income, programmers can open source
| all of their software and we can enable the maximum value
| creation possible. Other engineers like those that design
| commodities like dishwashers and cars or important manufacturing
| or medical equipment can also open source their designs so that
| repair costs are low and innovative improvements are easy to
| apply. I genuinely believe this would result in a steeper and
| more rapid innovation curve as well as a better world for all,
| than a world where we try to monetize things which have zero
| marginal cost to reproduce.
| valval wrote:
| I mean, I've seen worse arguments for socialism, but you seem
| to be painting an overly rosy picture. Yes, computers can
| reproduce software at zero marginal cost, but there's still a
| considerable investment in the initial creation and ongoing
| maintenance. While I'm all for a world where programmers and
| engineers are able to fully devote themselves to open source
| projects, it's not as simple as just making sure everyone has
| their basic needs met.
|
| The incentive structures are complex, and money still serves as
| a potent motivator for many to push boundaries and innovate.
| Remember, open-source doesn't always equate to high-quality or
| innovative, and proprietary doesn't always mean restrictive or
| uncreative. A balanced ecosystem where both proprietary and
| open-source software can coexist might be a more realistic and
| productive approach. I'm afraid that balance isn't too
| dissimilar from the one we have now, so I'm sort of forced to
| go with Occam's razor here.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I certainly think open source under capitalism (work at the
| margins, engineers spread thin) will always be worse than
| open source under socialism (abundant workforce, lower
| stress, more time available).
|
| As far as initial investment in the creation of the software
| - yeah, that's programmer time. The point of my scheme is to
| lower the cost of programmer time because their needs are
| already met, thus lowering the cost of initial investment.
|
| Hardware is a separate concern but I have a whole thing about
| how open source hardware tends to bring the hardware costs
| down to the lowest physically possible cost. Just look at 3D
| printers under patent ($25k) versus ten years after the
| patents expired and open source took over the low end ($250).
|
| I'm not sure how Occam's razor would suggest that the status
| quo is close to the ideal situation here. Those seem
| unrelated.
| patrec wrote:
| Sounds like an excellent idea that will work really well
| because it's incredibly well aligned with how humans actually
| function. I really wonder why no one else has thought of
| communism before.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| </sarcasm>, obviously. A couple remarks:
|
| Just because someone is proposing something for a small slice
| of society, doesn't mean they intend to propose something
| similar for _all_ of society. For instance, insisting on free
| schools, free (rail) roads, free health care, free water, and
| nationalised energy plants doesn't mean they want to make
| everything free, or that they want to nationalise everything,
| or that they are nostalgic for communist Russia or whatever.
| That's just the Red Scare talking. The fact is, different
| systems for different slices of society can and _do_ coexist.
|
| Human nature is not limited to the environment we're
| currently living in. Genetically we're barely different from
| the people of a couple hundred years ago. And yet our
| ancestors lived under many kinds of societies. It would be a
| little presumptuous to assume the one we're currently living
| in is the best. Especially considering how it came to be:
| remember that as Thatcher was saying capitalism/neoliberalism
| was natural, she did "nudge" things along by having the army
| pay a visit to workers on strike.
|
| Even communism isn't a monolith. It took various forms, which
| failed for various reasons. Sometimes it was direct outside
| interference, like how the Paris Commune was basically
| crushed by the national army.
| smolder wrote:
| These are the sorts of efficiency improvements that would go a
| long way towards tackling global warming and environmental
| destruction, particularly the open design to reduce waste. The
| question is, how can we get from where we are in terms of an
| economic and political system to one that supports a healthy
| commons and maximizes value, like you describe?
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| One problem is that most necessary projects aren't fun, and
| most fun projects aren't necessary. Does anyone design
| dishwashers as a hobby, as an easy example? How do you propose
| we motivate people to do work that isn't fun? Currently the
| carrot of higher pay or ownership in a more valuable thing is
| doing that, so we would need something to replace it if that
| goes away.
| smolder wrote:
| There are potentially other carrots aside from material
| wealth that can motivate people to do unpleasant work.
| Currently it takes significant pay to get people to do
| certain important but thankless jobs. We could thank them. A
| legacy is important to many people. They may enjoy an
| immutable commemoration of their work, if they're secure in a
| material sense.
| thorncorona wrote:
| This is the exact same answer every leftist I've talked to
| says when I ask them who will run the garbage system, and
| who will clean the sewers.
| Niksko wrote:
| Running the garbage system is a desk job largely I would
| expect. It might not be the most stimulating subject
| matter to you, but I think it's within the realm of
| possibility that you'd find people who found it an
| interesting system to manage.
|
| Cleaning the sewers sounds objectionable. I think you
| shouldn't discount the idea that in a societal structure
| that's different from ours you'd remove some of the
| social stigma that comes from such a job. But at the same
| time, if you observed that very very few people wanted to
| clean sewers for whatever reason, and there wasn't enough
| supply to meet demand, then you invest more in technology
| that reduces the shortfall. As others suggested,
| automation.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "But at the same time, if you observed that very very few
| people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason"
|
| The reason might be, most people do not like to be in the
| literal shit of others? It comes with actual health
| hazards btw.
|
| "and there wasn't enough supply to meet demand, then you
| invest more in technology that reduces the shortfall. As
| others suggested, automation"
|
| But we ain't there yet at all. What do we do, till then?
|
| The sewage needs to run 24 h and not only if someone
| feels like taking a look eventually.
|
| And as for ordinary garbage: mostly it is not a desk job,
| but physical labour to touch and move hundreds of
| different dirty garbage bins every day.
|
| Dealing with that shit, should always come with good
| compensation. (whether money or social credits or
| whatever currency is in use)
| Niksko wrote:
| > What do you do until then?
|
| Sure, but you iterate. We decided as a society that Polio
| was awful enough that we wanted to eradicate it. If we
| freed up enough effort that is currently wasted on
| chasing profits, we could eventually get to solving
| problems like "shit stinks and it sucks having to clean
| it".
| ilyt wrote:
| > I think you shouldn't discount the idea that in a
| societal structure that's different from ours you'd
| remove some of the social stigma that comes from such a
| job.
|
| I can see you haven't done any of jobs like that ever in
| your life. "Social stigma", lmao, that shit smells
|
| > But at the same time, if you observed that very very
| few people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason,
| and there wasn't enough supply to meet demand, then you
| invest more in technology that reduces the shortfall.
|
| It's delusional to think every job that's undesirable but
| necessary could be automated and that it would be cheaper
| than ye olde good material compensation for doing
| something hard/unpleasant.
|
| I mean, I'm all for it, but that won't happen to the
| level that would eliminate unpleasant jobs
| Niksko wrote:
| > I can see you haven't done any of jobs like that ever
| in your life. "Social stigma", lmao, that shit smells
|
| I haven't, but I didn't say that shit didn't smell. My
| point was that one component of why some jobs are worse
| than others is social stigma. Working at a fish monger or
| in a butchers shop stinks, and you probably get way less
| PPE than a sewer cleaner would. But butchers and
| fishmongers have less social stigma.
|
| > It's delusional to think every job that's undesirable
| but necessary could be automated and that it would be
| cheaper than ye olde good material compensation for doing
| something hard/unpleasant.
|
| The fallacy here is that it _needs_ to be cheaper. Sewer
| cleaning is valuable. If it requires more investment to
| automate so that we have enough supply to meet the
| demand, so be it. The only reason we haven't already
| automated this smelly job is because it's easier to turn
| a profit if you just pay people peanuts. If profit is no
| longer motivating, you can make vastly different
| decisions.
| geocar wrote:
| Why would you be so bothered to just let them? Would you
| feel embarrassed that "leftists" are nicer? That can be a
| motivation too! I know some people just show up so they
| can have someone to talk to for a few hours on a
| Saturday.
|
| I think if you can't find volunteers, you can have a
| lottery.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| C'mon, robots obviously! Cleaning sewers doesn't sound
| like any fun, but designing or remotely piloting a
| fatberg-blasting sewer shark bot? That sounds kickass!
| martinsnow wrote:
| But it the meantime while there exists no such robots, or
| while the prototypes get stuck downthere. Someone has to
| manually fetch them, and do the job. It's not very
| enticing and I don't think there will be many software
| engineers ready to suit up, to dig one out.
| Niksko wrote:
| Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You iterate, as
| with everything.
| smolder wrote:
| I know it seems crazy on its face. And I'm sure those
| leftists you refer to didn't have a coherent concept of
| how such a system would _actually work_. There 's no way
| we could just replace paychecks today with rations and
| social credits and have a functioning system. It'd be an
| extreme destabilizing change to a system we built
| incrementally over a long time to be self reinforcing.
| But I also have the view that people are very malleable
| and can conform to all sorts of social structures and
| belief systems.
| dingnuts wrote:
| In practice, once in power those leftists will just
| imprison or kill the people assigned to do the jobs if
| they refuse.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" But I also have the view that people are very
| malleable and can conform to all sorts of social
| structures and belief systems."_
|
| This is another view common to most (Marxist) communists,
| the belief in society's ability to cultivate the
| 'socialist man'.
| smolder wrote:
| Okay, so are you disputing what I said? Various disparate
| religions and ideologies _have_ cultivated adherents with
| notable success across history -- not least among them is
| free-market capitalism.
| [deleted]
| guidoism wrote:
| I like to think about how this works at smaller scales.
| When there is an office full of people all being paid
| about the same and (critically) where they all want and
| care about the same outcome, the shit jobs will get done.
| I have often called myself a "code janitor" since I clean
| up shit that was left behind. It's not because I didn't
| want to be working on fun greenfield projects but because
| it was shit that just needed to get done. So I did it.
| And so did others.
|
| Another example to play around with is when you go
| camping with friends. There's some shit work that just
| needs to be done. People pitch in. The same with staying
| at a friends house or a vacation rental with friends. Or
| cleaning leaves off of the storm drains. We all do this
| sort of work because it makes our lives better. If
| literal shit was piling up in front of my house I would
| probably shovel it even if it took 8 hours.
|
| Natural disasters are also examples where people do work
| for free without expectation of compensation. I think
| people are more like that than what happens in
| apocalyptic novels (even though I love reading them).
| rootusrootus wrote:
| How often do you talk to people this far to the left? I
| live in a family full of liberals and none of them even
| remotely think the world should operate this way. I think
| you could take every person in the US with ideology this
| far out to the left and put them in a single medium size
| stadium.
| ilyt wrote:
| [flagged]
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Let me analyze your sewage and garbage and sell your
| consumption habits to the highest bidder, and I might
| bite. Think of it as a "sump scription" :D
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Possible difference is that we may need far smaller
| number of programmers interested in dishwashers than we
| need for this jobs.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| The obvious answer is "pay people more".
|
| If we had UBI, for instance, and people did not _have_ to
| work in order to have basic needs (food and shelter) met,
| then the willingness to do unpleasant jobs like sewer
| cleaning will go down, and it 'll be necessary to pay
| people _more_ to do that work.
|
| And the need to pay people more will then drive
| technological innovation that may today not be worthwhile
| because "just hire someone" is less expensive. And in a
| world with UBI, automating away unpleasant jobs becomes
| more of an unmitigated win.
|
| (In case it isn't clear: I think "UBI plus a free market"
| is a much better system than "don't pay people but
| magically hope all the work gets done anyway".)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The USSR honored their hardest and most productive workers
| with huge billboards and monuments to their eternal glory
| and legacy. Could you name one?
| ilyt wrote:
| Sure, ask someone to shovel shit for 8h/day 5 days a week
| and see where your thanks will get you.
|
| You might find one sucker, but not nearly enough
| guidoism wrote:
| Clearly this isn't going to work in a world where people
| use the word "sucker" to refer to people who do work to
| help others. Honestly, do we call volunteers at soup
| kitchens suckers?
|
| The problem clearly involves an unequal distribution of
| work.
|
| If everyone is else being paid and you are trying to
| convince a single person to literally shovel shit for 8
| hours then yes, that won't work. They will feel like they
| are being taken advantage of. I think this is a common
| feeling amongst all workers. If your boss asks you to
| work late you are much less likely to be pissed off if
| the boss stays late and helps out too.
| ilyt wrote:
| I get the point that some jobs are boring and need actual
| materialistic motivation to be done but...
|
| I'm absolutely sure someone would design one out of sheer
| annoyance with existing solution (if existing solution would
| be bad).
|
| It would be interesting if system with very short copyright
| (say 3-5 years) would work. You'd still have leader's
| advantage for investing in development, but overall winner
| would be companies that can both innovate and fill the market
| and not just throw some ideas, patent them and live off
| people actually trying to implement them...
| scottyah wrote:
| There would be a perfect design for that one person, and
| everyone else would either do it themselves (not many
| could) or suffer
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think this is an argument to remove markets.
|
| It looks to me more like a suggestion to give people a some
| kind of guaranteed minimum income, and abolish all IP laws.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| I'm 200% convinced there are plenty of people out there who
| could easily be nerdsniped into building an open source
| dishwasher! Hackers get up to all kinds of stuff that doesn't
| seem traditionally fun!
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Does QAing Dishwasher firmware sound fun to you ?
|
| Even if you imagine software development to be generally
| fun, even the mundane, the rest of the workflow can be God
| awful boring. While Communism is a cool idea , it never
| works since you need incentives to motivate people.
| derefr wrote:
| Do you think there would be very many programmers in such a
| world?
|
| Personally, I think that a lot of people who right now go into
| programming "because it's a good career", would instead do
| things that are equally creative but also capture other things
| high on the Maslow hierarchy -- e.g. fame.
|
| Personally, despite enthusiastically enjoying my programming
| career and puzzle-oriented problem-solving more generally, I'm
| still intending to retire early and become a novelist. If I
| could "thrive regardless of income", I'd do that right now.
| guidoism wrote:
| My (honestly non-snarky) answer is: who cares?
|
| Do we really _need_ all of the programmers that are currently
| being employed? Will society collapse if there aren 't
| 100,000 working on the next photo sharing app?
|
| The important stuff will get done. Anything that is a luxury
| will get done only if someone wants to do it for themselves
| or if someone can convince another person to do it. Money
| doesn't need to disappear under a world of UBI, it's just not
| something that every single person on earth needs to
| participate in under thread of starvation and death.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is hard to guess what people would work on without needing
| to worry about money.
|
| You might try your novel, and one of two things could happen:
|
| You find out you love it, you write a really good novel, and
| society wins.
|
| You try it, find out that the actual experience of writing a
| novel is a drag. No harm no foul, you move on and keep trying
| things until you find something you are really passionate
| about and good at, and society wins.
|
| Maybe it is programming but you just need a more interesting
| program.
| PeterisP wrote:
| You can also find out that you love it despite the novels
| (or software or paintings or poems or whatever) not being
| interesting for almost anyone else or even being available
| to anyone, but as you don't need the money you can keep
| doing that (and only that) and society simply loses out on
| whatever you're doing currently.
|
| The key part of what people would work on without needing
| to worry about money is that there is literally zero reason
| to assume that the thing worked on would be useful to
| society in any way whatsoever, it can be useless or even
| detrimental to it - the current mechanism of monetary
| compensation is the thing aligning the work to interests of
| others, remove it and you can't expect that alignment to
| persist.
|
| Unconditional income is a solution to the problem when we
| don't need people's labor anymore - it makes all sense when
| people can just go off and do whatever without worrying if
| it benefits others enough to justify the basic goods and
| services they need, _and the society is okay with that_.
| But while we still do need the labor of most people, there
| needs to be motivation to guide that labor to the specific
| things society needs.
| guidoism wrote:
| I think there's a huge difference between everyone having
| unlimited material goods Star Trek style and UBI being a
| floor for everyone. I think of UBI as a floor that I can
| go below no matter how bad I screw up. If I start a
| company and max out my credit cards to fund it and it
| goes belly up then no matter how much I still owe to
| Chase I will still get my $1000/month to pay the rent and
| put food in my belly.
|
| But I will still want luxury goods and I'm willing to
| work for them most of the time. I want a phone upgrade
| every few years which might be a luxury I couldn't afford
| under UBI. I like flying airplanes and certainly would
| need to work to pay for that hobby. But if I get burnt
| out and want to read books for a year then I could do
| that too!
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| > there is literally zero reason to assume that the thing
| worked on would be useful to society in any way
| whatsoever, it can be useless or even detrimental to it -
| the current mechanism of monetary compensation is the
| thing aligning the work to interests of others, remove it
| and you can't expect that alignment to persist.
|
| I think a strong argument can be made that the current
| system does not necessarily align the work being done
| with the interests of others in a broad or universal
| sense. Think about a corporation with a very useful drug
| whose patent is about to expire. Allowing the drug to go
| generic would be in the best interests of many poor sick
| people all over the world (patent harmonization means
| even poor countries must follow US patent law or get
| locked out of global systems). However companies often
| find legal tricks they can use to effectively renew the
| patents for their drugs. This aligns with the interests
| of some people - the shareholders for example, but is
| detrimental to the interests of sick poor people all over
| the world.
|
| And this isn't a hypothetical, this just happened again
| two weeks ago with Johnson and Johnson and only a
| coordinated pressure campaign from some high profile
| YouTubers was able to get the company to relax their
| plans: https://youtu.be/tMhgw5SW0h4
|
| However when there is no profit motive, people often work
| on problems that they personally need to solve, and there
| is often good alignment with the work they are doing and
| the needs of others.
|
| More broadly, we can say that the current system does not
| necessarily align the work being done with the needs of
| most people, and that alternative ways of aligning that
| work must be possible.
| theragra wrote:
| Same amount as novelists ;) I enjoy both, in moderation
| rootusrootus wrote:
| From each according to his ability. So far we haven't worked
| out how to square that with human nature, and it keeps failing
| utterly.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Humans have tried all kinds of value transfer systems for
| thousands of years. Giving someone "tokens" (ie. currency) to
| convert that into whatever they want, or need has been the most
| flexible version of whatever has come before it. What one
| person needs to thrive is not the same another person needs to
| thrive, so who gets to set what that level is?
|
| I'd be skeptical of any system where there's no opportunity to
| get ahead as people will either find ways to take advantage of
| the system and screw others over, or the system becomes
| unsustainable as populations shift in size.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Generally the broad concept I work with is "community
| ownership of the means of production". What this means is
| that you are part owner in a cooperative of cooperatives that
| owns the machinery you depend upon for your well being. Of
| course your community trades with others and you and everyone
| have free choice to vote how you please and contribute as you
| desire. There is no "enforcement" that prevents you from
| accumulating more wealth but most of what you rely on is
| borrowed from a "things library" where you are permitted to
| use it indefinitely but not sell or destroy it, and in times
| of need the community may request that you return some items
| you are not using.
|
| More broadly I would say that many people believe the current
| system actually does not serve people well. We have a very
| small portion of the society that owns the means of
| production and 99 percent of the population have to deal with
| the dictums of those owners with very little say in how
| production is allocated. This leads to a world where the
| output is heavily slanted towards the ownership class while
| everyone else is fighting for scraps. A world with community
| ownership of the means of production would mean MUCH more
| wealth for the average person, so concerns over resource
| allocation would be less of a concern.
|
| The point anyway is that in the current system I certainly
| don't get to decide what my "level" is beyond trying to work
| hard, but in a community ownership model I would have much
| more say.
|
| As you have said we have been trying different value systems
| for thousands of years. No reason to believe attempts to
| improve the system should not continue.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We should guarantee minimum income, and abolish intellectual
| property. Build an economy around actually doing things rather
| than calling dibs on solutions. Let the market sort out the
| doing of things, just make sure everyone can participate.
| faangiq wrote:
| The problem with code monkeys is they have low social IQs. So
| business guys will just keep exploiting them.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| How does one divide up the money and how much is overhead this
| seems like the central question.
| kapitanjakc wrote:
| There's tons of free software out and there's tons of paid
| software too.
|
| Problem is with quality and adaptation.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| People often no longer own commercial licenses, but rather rent
| their assets until the updated terms of their agreements become a
| liability.
|
| Android -> Sales funnel for app store/services, and consumer
| profiling
|
| MacOS -> Sales funnel for app store/services, and consumer
| profiling
|
| Windows 11 -> Sales funnel for app store/services, and consumer
| profiling
|
| Ubuntu -> Sales funnel for app store/services, and consumer
| profiling
|
| Most people conflate information appliances with general purpose
| computing.
|
| It is a shame 98% of the market went this route... You still pay,
| but are just unaware how you are being monetized. =)
| transformi wrote:
| Sounds like onlyfans/ gumroad business model for developers... No
| doubts some developers will benefits from (like 10%), but it will
| leave the world less open in my opinion.
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| This product names crucial issues with how software development
| is currently monetized, and then offers an alternative that...
| solves absolutely none of these problems.
|
| Optional extras like 'downloads or other resources' are
| presumably digital and therefore do not solve the problem - folks
| can still pirate it. If that's not the point, then it is a
| donation, in the simplified parlance of the first paragraph of
| 1sub.dev.
|
| And this all from a company/effort that has such lofty goals that
| the html title of the page is 'a world where people pay for
| software'.
|
| This (how do you monetize software development / how do we e.g.
| let FOSS developers capture more than the current 0.0000000001%
| of the value they create) is an incredibly difficult problem and
| this effort sounds like some naive newbie took 5 seconds to think
| about it and thought: Yeah let's fix things!
|
| At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old fart: Hoo boy if it
| was that simple, it'd have been solved already.
|
| Alternative plans that work a lot better:
|
| * The NPM ecosystem has a ton of software-as-a-service offerings,
| e.g. where you can use their site to serve as online tool to e.g.
| make documentation, to have their site host that documentation,
| etc. I hate this model (you get nickel-and-dimed and both
| companies and open source developers alike don't usually like
| having 50 downstream service providers who, if they go down or
| have issues, require you having to explain to _your_ customers
| what's going wrong), but it solves the problems this site names
| (you can't pirate this, and you get something of value for your
| money in return).
|
| * Tidelift tries to provide security assurances and support: The
| payers don't just 'donate', they pay to just be done with the
| security issues with FOSS dependencies: Tidelift gives you
| software that scans all your dev work for all your deps and which
| versions you are on, and tidelift ensures not just that there are
| no major security holes in those deps, but also that the authors
| of those deps have made some basic promises about maintaining it
| in trade for real consideration (namely: money). Github sponsors
| and the like are more or less barking up the same tree. These
| setups also solve an unstated problem 1sub.dev tries to solve,
| which is: You tend to use _a lot_ of software; if you have, say,
| 600 dependencies (not crazy in this modern age of software dev),
| and you want to individually set up a 'deal' with all of em, one
| person has a full time job as they will have to renew over 2
| contracts __every working day__ assuming all your subscriptions
| are yearly.
|
| * Microsoft and co do it as a package deal: You pay one fee for
| everything they offer and aggressively legally chase down anybody
| that pirates.
|
| * patreon and co grease the wheels of the donation flow by making
| it simpler and allowing developers to give something that's hard
| to pirate: T-shirts and stickers, mentions in the 'about...' page
| and so on.
|
| * Some developers of FOSS, as well as _many_ commercial outfits,
| will accept money in trade for priority support.
|
| All of these models have issues. But at least they actually aim
| to solve the problems. This attempt doesn't even begin to tackle
| the actual issues, unless I'm missing something.
|
| As a 1million+ user FOSS developer who maintains the library
| primarily based on privilege (I have enough income to work for
| the roughly minimum wage I currently get for it, though I could
| have earned vastly more if I worked for a commercial entity for
| those hours) - I'm aware that this is not a good situation, that
| you need to sort out your finances separately just to be a good
| FOSS author. But, I don't see how 1sub.dev is going to add much
| compared to what's already there (patreon, github sponsors, FOSS
| aggregators like apache and eclipse foundation, tidelift, etc).
| robalni wrote:
| > offers an alternative that... solves absolutely none of these
| problems.
|
| Here is how 1sub solves or remedies the problems with the
| mentioned methods:
|
| - Pay to download or for other services: With 1sub it will be
| more worth it because you don't just get access to that
| software or that service, you get access to the software and
| services of all developers who participate in this system.
|
| - Accepting donations: While 1sub keeps some of the voluntary
| aspect of donations, you also get something for your money.
|
| > folks can still pirate it
|
| Yes, the point of this is not to make it impossible to do
| anything without a subscription. It just makes the difference
| in convenience between subscribing and not subscribing bigger
| since there are more things that you get or don't get depending
| on whether you subscribe.
|
| > this effort sounds like some naive newbie took 5 seconds to
| think about
|
| Interestingly I have thought about this for many years and no
| idea I have had before or any solution I have seen has felt as
| good as this one because they always fail in that the user
| doesn't have enough reason to pay. The main objective of this
| solution is to give the user more reason to pay.
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| I think the biggest problem is the financial infrastructure.
|
| We pay for software almost exclusively through digital means, but
| the fees are too damn high.
|
| Imagine if transaction fees were zero.
|
| Imagine if a piece of software you used costed 10 cents per
| months. Or someone's patreon or github sponsor was 5 cents per
| month.
|
| And then imagine if starting and stopping the subscription was
| intuitive and super easy with any digital payment method you
| happened to use.
|
| I could see the flood gates open and now developers who got
| basically nothing will get a ton of small contributions that
| together would make up quite a nice lump sum every month
| carlosjobim wrote:
| From experience I know this truth: Somebody who won't pay $5
| per month will never pay $1 per month nor will they ever pay 10
| cents per month.
|
| Something in the mind switches and people turn full on
| psychotic when it comes to paying for digital services, and
| there's not much that you can do to fight it with logic.
|
| Just look at Github projects for some really good stuff that
| are used by thousands or millions. At most the developers will
| have received 10-20 donations. Almost all of the commenters
| here on HN have never donated a single dollar to the projects
| that they love and enjoy.
| ativzzz wrote:
| A former company I worked for started having a larger Indian
| userbase. We experimented with supporting them more and it
| would be similar to what you said - significantly lower prices
| for them. We chose to mostly ignore the Indian userbase and let
| them use the product as is without catering to them
|
| The reality is that just because someone pays less doesn't mean
| they cost less to support. And then, if you support a large
| number of cheap users, it's even more expensive to support.
|
| As a business, you'd rather have 10 customers paying $10
| dollars each instead of 100 customers paying $1 each. Larger
| businesses can overcome this with economies of scale, but
| smaller businesses cannot
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| you can make people pay 10 cents a month for the software but
| the support is a separate subscription
| ativzzz wrote:
| Support includes things like "I paid and my account doesn't
| work". In addition, you simply can't provide a good service
| without support. Being able to answer questions like "I'm
| trying to do X with your tool, how do I do it?" leads to
| better customer engagement and retention. It's part of the
| cost of doing business. The marginal benefit of doing that
| to microrevenue customers is not worth it financially, and
| as a result, you will never get as good of engagement nor
| retention from them.
|
| One of the strengths of small business over a big co like
| Google is your support is NOT automated and you take the
| time and care to talk to and answer your customer's
| questions. You can't do that when you charge 10 cents a
| customer
|
| On top of that, you still need to market/advertise to those
| users.
|
| It's less time consuming, causes less friction, and is more
| profitable to just charge $10 dollars instead
| pixl97 wrote:
| At the same time cost gates are quality gates quite often.
| thorin wrote:
| Strangely this is the same thing that happened to the music
| business. Maybe we need to start selling merch and going out on
| tour to make a living!
| CharlesW wrote:
| https://linuxfoundation.store/
| Otek wrote:
| This needs Show HN:
| rco8786 wrote:
| I am super confused about the concept. I pay "someone", of my own
| choosing, and I get access to...what, exactly? "everything"? What
| is that? What incentive do the developers that I'm not paying
| have to give me something?
|
| > Pay to download or for other services: Not worth it; users can
| find the software somewhere else and they don't need your other
| services.
|
| I also reject this premise. My evidence being the trillions of
| dollars spent annually on software and other services.
| robalni wrote:
| What you get access to is everything that is protected using
| this site. Anyone can create paywalls. Here is an example of a
| link that only lets subscribers view this comments page:
| https://1sub.dev/link?u=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id%3D
| &s=p_GonuAYEe0&k=&n=hK5ZOXymlHi5s2Es&a=a.18
| majestic5762 wrote:
| Actually I'm seeing a big new wave of open source projects that
| you can host yourself, but can be used as SaaS if you are willing
| to pay. I'm always paying because I don't want to bother and
| because the devs have my /respect
| preommr wrote:
| I don't get it. I also see other comments not getting it so I
| don't think it's just me.
|
| Is this like Kindle unlimited where someone pays a single
| subscription and gets access to all content providers on the
| platform (in this case content is software), where creators get a
| proportion of the subscription fee based on how much a user used
| an app? So e.g. 10$ per month, I use FooReader 90% of the time,
| so they get 9$.
|
| Idk, even if I am not getting the details, I don't think that any
| collective approach to app is going to work. Unlike with other
| industries like movies or music, products in software are very
| different from each other and is consumed in a variety of ways
| (library vs end-user app) that have a lot of complicated nuance
| (in terms of licensing and company goals).
| robalni wrote:
| > where someone pays a single subscription and gets access to
| all content providers on the platform (in this case content is
| software), where creators get a proportion of the subscription
| fee
|
| It is like that, except that users buy the subscriptions
| directly from the developers. 1Sub doesn't handle any money.
| This also means that the developers get 100% of the money
| (except for any transaction fees depending on payment method).
| [deleted]
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| There does need to be some way for ordinary users to pay
| _something_ to _somewhere_ in a single convenient way,
| voluntarily and in voluntary amounts, that somehow ends up being
| pooled and distributed to or otherwise benefitting all the 37,000
| developers and projects whos free work they use all day every
| day.
|
| This isn't it.
|
| I donate a little to the EFF, monthly automatic, and a few other
| things irregularly as I feel particular gratitude. It leaves a
| million people unaccounted for, but all you can do today is pick
| a few things that matter to you and let others get the others.
|
| And/or pay back/forward by contributing a little work of your own
| to the commons which I also do, but you can't expect most to do
| that, and I don't claim mine is valuable. Actually come to think
| of that, the reason I work on the things I work on is mostly
| because I just want to, so maybe most of those million are fine
| and there's no problem. But come to me with any kind of demand,
| well, I guess that's when paying enters the chat.
| robalni wrote:
| This is compatible with that.
|
| One such service that distributes payments could sell
| subscriptions in this system. That's one of the ideas I have
| had all the time with this project but I guess I forgot to
| write down; payment distributers should be one of those you can
| subscribe to.
| Pxtl wrote:
| This sounds like Patreon.
|
| Imho, the "just buy it" or "patreon to access the development
| discord/forum/whatever for OSS" seem like the best approaches.
| Like, I'm in Mastodon's patreon, and I'm happy to buy software.
| And while it may sting, I'm okay with "major release = new
| version buy it again". Not fond fond of installed local non-cloud
| software in the SAAS business model.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _This sounds like Patreon._
|
| It's exactly Patreon or one of its many competitors. The
| "subscribe to a creator and get special perks" problem is
| common and solved, but as you note the "CaaS" (creator as a
| service) model isn't for everyone.
| jansommer wrote:
| > Pay to download or for other services: Not worth it; users can
| find the software somewhere else and they don't need your other
| services.
|
| If users can find the software elsewhere, then it must be cheaper
| or better if they don't want to use yours. If this is about
| pirating, then it's just a matter of time before they buy, unless
| the ransom for decrypting their personal files bankrupts them.
|
| Please, no more subscriptions.
| Otek wrote:
| I know people hate Subscriptions but honestly I quite like them.
| I can pay for one month usually not very high price to use
| software when I need it. Problem is to be solved by developers,
| they should give more often option to buy lifetime license, or
| allow you to use software for lifetime after you payed for 1 year
| of subscription (without updates). It's just not profitable
| enough I believe. Maybe we will have appropriate laws in the
| future - that's the solution I would like to see
| tiltowait wrote:
| Paying for one month every once in a while for software that
| would otherwise be very expensive is about the only benefit I
| can see for subscriptions. For instance, Apple seems to be
| moving Final Cut Pro to a subscription model, and a $5/mo
| subscription is pretty great if you just need to use it once or
| twice or very sporadically.
|
| Subscriptions always feel a little scummy to me, due in part to
| the way they're often advertised. I think that "Only $5/mo!"
| followed by tiny print saying "Billed annually" should be
| illegal, because it's clearly deceptive advertising.
| [deleted]
| mrweasel wrote:
| Subscriptions just becomes unmanageable when you have to many.
| I do like your example of some software where you just need it
| for a month, but I don't think that should be a subscriptions
| then. That should just be paying for one or two months upfront.
|
| The issue that I have with subscriptions is, as I said, they
| become unmanageable and they are frequently dishonest, betting
| on you to forget to cancel them. You do a one year subscription
| for something, forget to cancel in time, and now you're stuck
| paying for two years.
|
| Both SaaS and many other type of subscriptions really need to
| drop the recurring part and just let you "rent" the product.
| That seems more honest to me.
| Otek wrote:
| I just use single-use card whenever I don't use AppStore for
| subscription. That way they won't charge me again and if I
| end up using and liking the software I will remember to
| change card or provide another single use card
| api wrote:
| I don't mind subscriptions if they deliver consistent value
| _and if I can cancel them easily when I want._
|
| A lot of hatred of subscriptions comes from hard-to-cancel dark
| patterns that should be illegal.
| grishka wrote:
| Speaking of software business models, I like the idea of charging
| money for convenience. As in, make the app open-source, but sell
| compiled binaries and maybe tech support.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| That's the AWS model.
|
| Take a free open source product, and charge for hosting &
| maintaining it.
| grishka wrote:
| Yeah, if it's a server app, you can also sell it as a hosted
| service.
| tomrod wrote:
| Can I just say, I absolutely love the functionality of this side
| and its linked sites? I really appreciate fast, simple sites.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| So it's like SetApp?
| gizmo wrote:
| Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used
| by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough
| people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then
| some.
|
| Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any
| physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled
| with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality
| control and returns. It still blows my mind how much easier it is
| to run a business that deals with bytes instead of atoms. The OP
| talks about software having no copy protection, but Amazon sells
| DVD players and cordless drills for $30. Imagine for a second how
| hard it is to compete with that. Competing with Google or
| Microsoft or some startup is a walk in the park in comparison.
|
| In software the hard part is making an excellent product. And
| let's face it, that's where most people fail. It has nothing to
| do with monetization.
| 7e wrote:
| Not at all. Software has low marginal cost, but that has high
| fixed costs that need a monetizable market to sustain. Good
| software takes effort and great people. Those are expensive. If
| you can't monetize you can't put people on your software and it
| will suck (like most OSS software, for example). Physical
| manufacturing is hard, but at least it brings in dollars. OSS,
| privacy and wankers reverse engineering your software shrinks
| your market substantially.
| buggy6257 wrote:
| I'm not sure I get your argument. Basically everything you're
| talking about applies to physical manufacturing too. You have
| high fixed costs (equipment, location, assembly line workers,
| what have you), and you also have marginal cost (software
| basically has zero marginal cost). Good physical goods also
| take effort, and great people to design them.
|
| > Physical manufacturing is hard, but it at least brings in
| dollars
|
| You say this as if it's some indelible fact that if you make
| a physical product, it WILL be bought and you WILL make a
| profit no matter what, but I think it's safe to say this is
| objectively false, as many failed physical business would
| attest to.
|
| > OSS, privacy and wankers reverse engineering your software
| shrinks your market substantially.
|
| As opposed to in the physical world, where nobody ever cribs
| your ideas and sells them at a discount compared to you...
| AKA "Amazon's business model"? (not to mention overseas
| knockoffs of products
|
| Given all these things being equal then, software has all the
| same benefits that your parent comment mentioned, while
| staying at best EQUAL with physical manufacturing, save for
| maybe higher salaries to the people making your product
| (arguable in some cases, but on average probably true) but
| this difference pales in comparison to not having to own a
| warehouse and manage last-mile shipping costs etc.
| ipaddr wrote:
| A physical product has limitations. Creating 1,000 car
| mirrors requires capital, storage, self space to sell. Once
| the mirrors are created no changes can occur. Any changes
| requires a new batch.
|
| Software has expectations that it can and should be changed
| after purchase through updates/patches/upgrades/saas
| products. That creates an ongoing cost a physical product
| doesn't have.
|
| There are tradeoffs and different expectations which make
| both difficult. I would rather go the software root because
| I have the advantage of free developer time but someone
| else might find making 10,000 widgets from China much
| easier and cheaper. We think software is easier because we
| devalue what we add and what we really cost
| LegitShady wrote:
| >Software has expectations that it can and should be
| changed after purchase through
| updates/patches/upgrades/saas products. That creates an
| ongoing cost a physical product doesn't have.
|
| Nowadays businesses use this to create a constant revenue
| stream from what used to be a single purchase. It's not
| to service the product, its to continue to soak money
| from the people who do end up spending on it.
|
| Aside from security updates most software I have, I just
| want them to stop. No changes, no design upgrades, no "we
| changed this tier of our pricing" etc. Most of that stuff
| is working against the customer not for them. Your SaaS
| model is so you can make money, I have no incentive to
| pay more than I have to.
| dcow wrote:
| > I have no incentive to pay more than I have to.
|
| You have to pay their recurring revenue if you want them
| to stay in business and keep the lights on so you can use
| their product. That's the hard reality. If you run your
| own server and fix your own bugs and etc. (which is
| feasible for many here, I'm not saying it's a bad option)
| _then_ you can "pay no more than you have to".
| JohnFen wrote:
| > You have to pay their recurring revenue if you want
| them to stay in business and keep the lights on so you
| can use their product.
|
| It's not my problem that they've settled on a revenue
| model that isn't in line with what I'm prepared to do.
| dcow wrote:
| Sure, then you're okay with the consequences of the
| product not existing when they go out of business.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I am entirely fine with that, yes. It might make room for
| better business models to return.
| LegitShady wrote:
| If it was just software they sold it would still exist.
| It's only a saas and abusive license.verififcation that
| means if they go out of business they remove all benefits
| from previously paid amounts, and that's not in my
| interest either.
| Mc91 wrote:
| > If you can't monetize you can't put people on your software
| and it will suck (like most OSS software, for example).
|
| I have worked on FLOSS software and I have worked on non-
| FLOSS software and I don't see most FLOSS software sucking in
| a way that non-FLOSS does not.
|
| FLOSS has some advantages - as there is no compelling need to
| release new features which can drive up revenue and profit
| (or at least OKRs) for the next quarter, you don't get a
| constant need to release unneeded junk to try to squeeze the
| last dime out of consumers. You can actually spend time
| refactoring the code, or only releasing when it is properly
| architected.
|
| Most of the servers and smartphones in the world are running
| on a FLOSS kernel. MacBook's OS derive from CSRG's BSD, and
| even some of Windows, like the Internet stack, derive from
| FLOSS. If it sucks so much, why do virtually all major
| operating systems derive fully, or at least partially, from
| it?
| JohnFen wrote:
| One of the reasons why I strongly prefer FLOSS over
| commercial software is that FLOSS tends to be of better
| quality.
|
| Whether or not I pay money for it doesn't enter into my
| calculation much at all.
| gnulinux wrote:
| It's almost like we live in different world, I could not
| disagree more.
|
| * Software is _extremely_ expensive. Software engineers are
| expensive, and for a good software project you need a tech
| lead, a manager and probably a few developers. These are all
| people you need to pay tons of money for.
|
| * Software is constantly changing, something that worked 2
| years ago can be broken beyond repair today. You need a team
| that can keep up with this.
|
| * Software needs maintenance. You can't just build an app an
| call it a day, you need to employ a team to maintain it
| continuously. You can build a massive, gargantuan bridge and
| maintain it maybe every few years/half a decade to keep it safe
| for 30+ years, you cannot do that in software.
|
| * Unlike what outsider think, software -- even "boring"
| CRUD/web software -- is still very much a research project. If
| you ask a civil engineer how to build a bridge, they'll tell
| you about all the techniques that were developed over the many
| many decades. What a developer focuses on while writing code is
| mostly ideas developed in the last few years. Although you
| think you're building a simple app with 3 devs, what you're
| missing is you have your own tiny research lab studying how to
| develop this simple app the cheapest way possible while making
| it maintainable.
|
| * Software by its very nature is hard to make money off of. Its
| complexity is opaque to most people, they're not willing to
| pay. You'll always have people pirating it, eating away from
| your bottom line. Moreover, each new software means changing
| workflow, so even if you have the best product on the market,
| decent amount of people won't switch from the industry
| standard.
|
| * Modern software engineering methodology focuses on, among
| other things, time to ship, feature richness and
| maintainability. It does not focus on correctness -- partially
| because our theories on software correctness are lacking (even
| if you decide to use novel/extreme approaches such as
| Dependently Typed Programming, formal proofs etc it's
| unclear/unknown if you'll reach a significantly better
| correctness metric). This makes your product inherently
| frustrating to the customer. No matter how much money you
| spend, you'll always have a product that's a little bit buggy.
| This means the product is very sensitive to the amount of money
| you throw at it. If you throw Apple level of money, it'll be
| less buggy, if you have a barebones team it'll be more buggy.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| > Unlike what outsider think, software -- even "boring"
| CRUD/web software -- is still very much a research project.
| If you ask a civil engineer how to build a bridge, they'll
| tell you about all the techniques that were developed over
| the many many decades. What a developer focuses on while
| writing code is mostly ideas developed in the last few years.
|
| Most (all?) of the ideas I see are at least 20 years old, if
| not 40-50. Something like Spring wouldn't be my ideal choice,
| but it can certainly get the job done for most people, and
| it's 20 years old. MVC dates back to the 70s. Postgresql is
| 27 years old and is a fantastic choice. SQL and RDBMSs date
| back to the 70s. The term CRUD itself dates back to the 80s.
| Server rendered pages are still easy to do, perform way
| better than most React-based abominations, and are as old as
| the web. If anything, software is plagued by these "research
| projects" that are mostly just to scratch smart people's
| itches.
| jkepler wrote:
| > * Software needs maintenance. You can't just build an app
| an call it a day, you need to employ a team to maintain it
| continuously. You can build a massive, gargantuan bridge and
| maintain it maybe every few years/half a decade to keep it
| safe for 30+ years, you cannot do that in software.
|
| > * Unlike what outsider think, software -- even "boring"
| CRUD/web software -- is still very much a research project.
| If you ask a civil engineer how to build a bridge, they'll
| tell you about all the techniques that were developed over
| the many many decades.
|
| As a nonpracticing civil engineer, you're underestimating the
| ongoing maintence that goes into any large bridge.
|
| Also, though the techniques may be more established, every
| bridge must still be designed to fit the specific
| characteristics of its local geology and geography. But come
| to think of it, fundamental computer science algorithms are
| pretty well established, like bridge-building techniques.
| Software engineering is simply fitting the code to each
| unique problem, as bridge design fits a bridge to each unique
| place.
| dcow wrote:
| The dirty secret is that you _rarely_ need to invest in
| new, novel, software engineering techniques which is what
| you need actual software engineers for. In reality you can
| just get a few software developers to propose a design for
| a thing, have a software engineer consultant review the
| design and sign off, and then go on your merry way building
| the software. Kinda like how architecture /construction vs
| engineering works in meat space.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Making an excellent product is hard, but what is really hard,
| is maintaining it for years and decades afterwards.
|
| Maintenance, addition of new functionality, bugfixing, porting
| to other platforms etc. takes easily 10x-50x time than the
| initial release, and eats the vast majority of the developers'
| time and energy.
|
| This is where "not being paid for your work" translates into
| abandoned projects.
| grishka wrote:
| An excellent product doesn't need maintenance if it doesn't
| rely on any online services. Once it's done, it's done. It
| does everything it needs and nothing it doesn't need.
|
| Engineering projects usually have a finished state. Software
| engineering is no different, no matter how much the industry
| wants you to believe otherwise.
| j1elo wrote:
| Software engineering is like if a car was built and thus
| "finished", but the systems it depends on (like roads, and
| gas stations) changed every N years (with N < 10).
|
| Imagine the gas stations (operating system) changed the
| kind of fuel they dispense every few years. No, by no means
| a car (software) that is fully finished _today_ would be
| able to continue doing its thing _tomorrow_ , without
| ongoing updates.
|
| This also happens in the real world, it's just that changes
| are more likely in the decades or centuries, so we as
| humans don't perceive them so well.
|
| The fact that Microsoft spends a whole lot of money to
| avoid this, is circumstantial. Apple doesn't so much, and
| at some point your finished software will stop working with
| newer MacOS releases if you don't update it to the newer
| system versions.
|
| Linux is even more of a moving target. Good luck having a
| perfectly well working compiled program today, and trying
| to run it in 10 years time.
| grishka wrote:
| Is there any reason -- other than "we're paying our
| graphic designers full-time salaries so we better get our
| money's worth" -- why OSes have to change so drastically
| and can't be finished as well, only ever updated to add
| new APIs for apps and drivers to support new hardware
| features?
| vel0city wrote:
| > only ever updated to add new APIs for apps and drivers
| to support new hardware features
|
| Sounds like it's not "finished" if it needs all these
| updates.
|
| As for why change the window dressing, the market for
| style changes over time. Why do car companies change the
| look of their products? Why does the outside of a cereal
| box ever change? Do the inside of our houses today look
| the same as the 80s? The 70s? The 40s?
|
| Are you arguing that Windows and MacOS should continue to
| look like it's 1.0 release?
| jwells89 wrote:
| Security is probably the biggest reason. With attacks
| growing continually more sophisticated, it's not enough
| to just patch holes as they're found -- you have to
| engineer entirely new systems to not be drowned in holes.
| This unfortunately has compatibility implications.
|
| Look at macOS for example, which over the years has
| gained app sandboxing and mobile-like access permissions.
| Software pre-dating these additions that assumes that it
| has access to everything all the time will have its
| functionality impaired. Devs had to update their software
| to not make such huge assumptions and to handle no access
| cases gracefully.
| chromoblob wrote:
| The program's interface with environment won't change
| forever, when you write your program as a pure function
| which only touches exactly the thing it fundamentally
| needs to, you use a pretty much finalized interface.
| grishka wrote:
| So, how secure is "secure enough"? Android's security
| model is okay, and Google knows it, so they just keep
| redesigning the UI without substantial API changes
| because _the updates have to be coming out_ with each lap
| the planet makes around its star.
|
| > Devs had to update their software to not make such huge
| assumptions and to handle no access cases gracefully.
|
| Sure. But at some point it _will_ reach the "secure
| enough" state, won't it?
|
| (Actually, macOS permissions work mostly transparently
| API-wise. Apps can request access explicitly so it better
| fits their particular UX, but the prompt would also pop
| up the first time the protected resource is accessed. No
| code-level changes are necessary to support this.)
| jwells89 wrote:
| > Android's security model is okay, and Google knows it,
| so they just keep redesigning the UI without substantial
| API changes because the updates have to be coming out
| with each lap the planet makes around its star.
|
| Google is a bit of a special case I think due to their
| culture of using big projects as a means of climbing the
| corporate ladder. The only thing that could ever possibly
| result from that is endless churn.
|
| > Sure. But at some point it will reach the "secure
| enough" state, won't it?
|
| Maybe, I'm too much of a layman in the field of infosec
| to be able to say.
|
| > (Actually, macOS permissions work mostly transparently
| API-wise. Apps can request access explicitly so it better
| fits their particular UX, but the prompt would also pop
| up the first time the protected resource is accessed)
|
| True, but it's still problematic if e.g. the user
| accidentally denies access unknowingly, which will result
| in the app producing seemingly nonsensical errors. For a
| good user experience the app needs to be able to tell the
| user what the real problem is.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Completely incorrect.
|
| Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change.
|
| Dependencies break.
|
| Security updates.
|
| Etc.
|
| Engineering projects usually hand off maintenance to their
| owner. Your house/car need maintenance. Your cities
| roads/bridges/tunnels need maintenance.
|
| The difference with software is that maintenance is done by
| the producers as they own the code.
| grishka wrote:
| > Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change.
|
| OSes also can be "excellent products". They don't _need_
| yearly updates, there 's nothing inherent to them that
| would prevent them from being made perfect, finished and
| never updated again.
|
| The only case when an otherwise perfect OS would truly
| need to update is when new hardware capabilities require
| OS-level changes to support. Sometimes it may be
| beneficial to expose these new hardware capabilities as
| APIs for apps to consume. But again, adding new APIs
| shouldn't break the existing ones. For example, on
| phones, this would include things like notched screens,
| fingerprint readers or multiple rear-facing cameras.
|
| > Dependencies break.
|
| Don't update dependencies. Pick one version that serves
| you well and stick with it forever. I'm serious.
|
| > Security updates.
|
| It seems like we've already realized that writing code
| that deals with complex data structures received from
| untrusted parties in memory-unsafe languages like C is a
| terrible idea. If you exclude memory safety
| vulnerabilities, the attack surface shrinks drastically.
| You'd run out of security vulnerabilities pretty fast if
| you'd have any to begin with.
|
| > Your house/car need maintenance. Your cities
| roads/bridges/tunnels need maintenance.
|
| Houses, cars, and road infrastructure are made out of
| atoms and exposed to elements and stress of our imperfect
| real world. They wear out. Code doesn't. In 100 years,
| the bits would be the same they are today (as long as you
| use a reliable enough storage medium).
| duckmysick wrote:
| I'd rather use an imperfect product that does a good-
| enough job instead of waiting for a perfect product.
|
| The perfect OS doesn't exist yet. Right now, I'd rather
| use some OS than no OS.
|
| Why a perfect OS doesn't exist? Good question. Maybe
| because the programming field is relatively immature so
| we're still figuring things out and we don't apply formal
| verification to everything. Compare that to say,
| architecture, where we can calculate how much weight a
| structure can withstand. Or the other way around: what do
| we need to do to support an X amount of load.
|
| I guess the stakes are lower too. I wouldn't walk on a
| wobbly bridge, but I don't mind if a desktop app I use
| crashes occasionally under unusual circumstances.
| Critical software (say, aviation) is generally written
| with more care but it's still not perfect.
| nemo wrote:
| This all sounds fine hypothetically, you might want to
| take a look around at the world for a while to see why it
| doesn't fit your model. Obviously your idea hasn't
| happened, and there's good reasons why this is the case
| that you could readily discover if you took a look at
| reality instead of your model of reality.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| > there's nothing inherent to them that would prevent
| them from being made perfect, finished and never updated
| again.
|
| theres this thing called the internet, to which the OS
| connects, filled with adversarial actors, so no this is
| not correct at all
| chromoblob wrote:
| > this is not correct at all
|
| Why?
|
| There's a thing called formal verification of software.
| grishka wrote:
| And? How do updates help any of this? Firewalls are a
| thing. Memory-safe languages are a thing. Unit tests are
| a thing. Fuzzing is a thing. And it is not an OS's job to
| protect the user from themselves (i.e. social
| engineering). If you've installed malware, you deserve
| the consequences and you will be more careful next time.
| It's okay for powerful technologies to require a minimum
| level of education.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Uh, look at curl. It is an excellent product, no doubt
| about it (or if you do, I wonder what your standards for
| excellence are), and yet we are here, at version 8.0, 27
| years after its first release.
|
| Edit:
|
| "if it doesn't rely on any online services"
|
| That is a big IF. How many things don't, at least
| indirectly? (e.g. by relying on HTTPS, which requires TLS,
| which requires keeping up with current cryptographic
| standards.)
| vel0city wrote:
| Engineering projects have a finished state? So once they
| build a road or bridge or dam, nobody needs to touch it
| again forever? It's finished right, no more work anymore.
|
| Even in electronic hardware there's often continuation of
| design and refinement. Have you never seen a board with a
| revision number on it?
| grishka wrote:
| > It's finished right, no more work anymore.
|
| Real-world objects like these wear out. Code doesn't.
|
| > Have you never seen a board with a revision number on
| it?
|
| Of course I have. There's a difference though. You can't
| ship an electronic device that's unfinished with a
| promise to "fix it later". Yet this is what routinely
| happens with software these days. Also, if your device
| serves its purpose well, you'd probably have a "final"
| board revision with all flaws fixed. If you want to add
| features to an electronic device, you'd _make it a
| different model_ , possibly sold concurrently with your
| existing one to serve people with different needs and
| budgets.
| vel0city wrote:
| > Real-world objects like these wear out
|
| You just said "engineering". Bridges and roads are
| engineering as well buddy. And it's not even just the
| wear, it's the continued refinement and upgrade of these
| structures which is a constant engineering effort.
|
| > Engineering projects usually have a finished state
|
| This is the statement I'm addressing. And it's just not
| entirely accurate. Things change, assumptions get proven
| wrong, there's always a newer and better way to do
| something, etc.
|
| Sure your widget was probably about as good as you could
| do at the time you first launched it, but several years
| later there's better components available. Or maybe a
| supplier stops making some part you were using. Or a few
| years later you start getting parts back failing early in
| their service life and need to make an update. What was
| once your finished state now isn't.
| XCSme wrote:
| Completely agree.
|
| Nowadays, software is different from the CD era, where you
| bought a game/software and that was it. Nowadays, people
| expect the software to be maintained, kept up to date and
| always compatible with the latest changes (new OS versions,
| compatibility with other software, etc.).
|
| Maintenance is the high cost of software, not building it.
| This is why I sell my products with a perpetual license but
| with paid yearly updates. I can not work for free
| indefinitely as all the "lifetime" licenses promise.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think there are a few interesting threads to pick at
| here.
|
| First, some of these problems are created by software
| developers themselves. In particular, shoving in an online
| component where one doesn't need to exist basically
| guarantees that you will have recurring costs and the need
| for constant maintenance.
|
| Second, Microsoft is much more careful about maintaining
| backwards compatibility than Apple. I can generally fire up
| 10+ year old software on Windows 10, no problem. The same
| is _sometimes_ true on OSX /iOS, but often not. The
| increasing popularity of Apple products and the lower
| priority they place on backwards compatibility has
| definitely made developers' lives harder.
|
| Having said all that, I don't think _everybody_ expects
| constant updates. I think power users, especially, are used
| to running what works for them for long periods of time.
| You probably can 't build the next Google on this, but a
| lifestyle business? Certainly. Just look at Pinboard and
| it's lack of enhancements or UI overhauls - and that's an
| _online_ service.
| pmontra wrote:
| The traditional way to fund maintenance was to release a new
| and better version of the product. Example, all the releases
| of the various office suites from the days of MS-DOS up to
| Windows up to the cloud. If sales decline, sell to a
| competitor (good timing required) or close and switch to
| something else. A company that paid salaries for 5-10 years
| is still nothing to be ashamed of.
|
| In the case of Apple, keep selling new hardware. I can't
| remember if they ever sold their software in the first years
| of Macs or if it was bundled with the hardware.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > I can't remember if they ever sold their software in the
| first years of Macs or if it was bundled with the hardware.
|
| In the early OSX era they used to sell their office suite
| separately. Eventually it got bundled with hardware for
| free. They still sell some software, like Final Cut Pro.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Plenty of people are using copies of Word, Powerpoint, and
| Excel 2003 just fine, which received literally zero
| 'maintenance' for at least a decade or more depending on
| personal preferences.
|
| For most software that can be sold in a box, without an
| attached cloud service, this approach works.
|
| EDIT: Also some fraction would be using them on computers
| that literally haven't been upgraded or connected to the
| internet for a decade or more.
| belugacat wrote:
| It is amusing that your argument for software not needing
| "maintenance" is pointing out 3 pieces of software that had
| each received 20 years of maintenance by the time they
| reached the year you picked, 2003.
| crickey wrote:
| It was also selling for 20 years. Its the same with
| physicall products if it sels u will update and maintain
| the product.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I've edited my comment since it appears your the third
| person confused as to the possibility of using them on
| older computers.
| singlow wrote:
| I think you are confused because the 2003 version of
| those products had already had as many as 20 years of
| maintenance, in the form of prior releases upon which
| they were based. Word was first released in 1983 and
| Excel in 1985.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The 1985 version of Excel was Mac only. The 2003 version
| is about as closely related as iOS is to Mac System 7.
|
| If you don't understand Excel's history, it's better to
| not make such a bizarre claim.
| dboreham wrote:
| > Plenty of people are using copies of Word, Powerpoint,
| and Excel 2003 just fine
|
| Unless they're also using computers and OSes from 2003
| (spoiler -- they're not because those OSes wouldn't work
| with today's internet), those people are benefiting from
| untold efforts in the meantime to maintain their OS so it
| has that compatibility with 20 year old user space code.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| I have a Pentium 4 machine running Win XP in regular
| operation since 2003. I use it to create content in
| CorelDRAW 11 and AutoCAD 2004.
|
| That sweet sensation of being owner of what you paid for
| comes as a bonus.
| masukomi wrote:
| if you think those aren't receiving maintenance you're not
| paying attention or are ignorant as to how hard it is to
| keep a complex app compiling as operating systems move
| forward.
|
| Not receiving new features is VERY different from not
| receiving maintenance. It is wholly implausible to believe
| that there has been zero energy spent on keeping those
| codebases working in the past 10 years.
| civilized wrote:
| I don't think you understand. Office 2003 (or earlier)
| and similar products aren't constantly phoning home for
| updates like more recent software. Millions of people
| have had a single 100% static binary for these programs
| running on their computer for many years. The ability to
| phone home, if it exists at all, may even be broken or
| disabled.
|
| This is in fact how all software worked until, I don't
| know, about two decades ago? Things being patched was a
| big deal, a voluntary manual process, and didn't happen
| often. The update would even have a well-known name like
| "Service Pack 2".
|
| The idea that all software must be constantly maintained
| is recent and the assumption that it is necessary is
| mostly self-imposed by the software business. Users don't
| share this assumption, and in fact on many products,
| updates are viewed mostly neutral to negatively, other
| than perhaps critical security updates on products that
| are used in connection to the internet or untrusted data.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Single static binary software, the blessed future we
| never saw.
| zer8k wrote:
| As beautiful as it is, and for the all the problems
| dynamic linking causes, the edges on single static binary
| software are very, very sharp.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I'm not sure what to say to this... you can just buy an
| old copy of Office 2003 on eBay, an old Windows XP
| computer, and boot it up and try it out?
|
| You don't have to believe me, I imagine practically every
| reader on HN has the means to verify this for themselves.
| j1elo wrote:
| That kind of rethoric doesn't fly too far... Your
| original point was
|
| > _Plenty of people are using Word, Powerpoint, and Excel
| 2003 just fine_
|
| Are you claiming that a reasonable majority (for the sake
| of discussion) of this plenty of people are using Office
| 2003 _on Windows XP machines_??
|
| I'd doubt it. More like there's plenty of people using
| old software in _modern_ versions of Windows. The
| maintenance work, of course, exists and has been done
| indirectly, by Microsoft, in the development iterations
| of Windows itself.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| If you also include Windows 2000, Vista, and 7 computers
| that weren't updated in the last decade, I think that
| would be a sizeable fraction of all Office 2003 users in
| 2023.
|
| Whether or not they make up the numerical majority of all
| extant users is simply irrelevant to the point of 'Plenty
| of people'. It's easily many, many, thousands.
| yread wrote:
| Sure you can do that. But look at the list of 60
| vulnerabilities with score 9+ that you're exposing
| yourself to:
|
| https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
| list.php?vendor_id=...
|
| So you can try it out but don't open any documents, or
| run it while connected to the net. You'd better also not
| insert any images. Have fun!
|
| We could also have a post "World where bad people don't
| try to break your software"
| crickey wrote:
| You answered your own issues. Dont open untrusted
| documents from the net. not running while connected to
| the net seems mute as the software doesnt directly access
| the internet. Seems like issues even the most up to date
| software suffers from.
| bena wrote:
| Support for Office 2003 ended in 2014. Close to a decade
| ago. No maintenance, no patches, no service packs,
| nothing. No energy expended working on that codebase.
|
| Office 2016 is going EOL in two years.
|
| That's from Microsoft themselves. They do not hide these
| facts or make it hard to find.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| And?
|
| I find it mindboggling that a simple program like text
| processors have to be continually updated for decades.
| Just program it right once for god sakes.
| adamc wrote:
| You vastly underestimate the complexity involved. Also,
| new attacks get discovered that were not even dreamed 20
| years ago. There is no "just get it right" when right is
| measured by what we know, and that keeps changing.
| nemo wrote:
| >I find it mindboggling that a simple program like text
| processors have to be continually updated for decades
|
| Your assumption that a word processor is a simple program
| is something you might want to consider, at a low level
| handling text rendering in a word processor is highly
| complex work. Besides text encodings regularly evolving
| and changing over the years especially in the pre-UTF-8
| world (but even with Unicode), there's also the reality
| that security threats evolve over time, and once threats
| are discovered old code that once seemed fine becomes
| insecure and dangerous. In computing the reality is that
| there's constant change driven by supporting a regularly
| changing computing environment, security fixes, bug
| fixes, increased computing power permitting new features
| that are then implemented and new ideas appearing, et al.
| Software will always be changing, that's the way things
| are, there's good reasons for this. Trying to oppose that
| reality with an unrealistic model that doesn't account
| for the causes of change just leaves you misunderstanding
| the way the industry works.
| j45 wrote:
| Unlike recent versions of Office, old ones didn't call
| home, and Microsoft doesn't really have an idea of how
| many copies of their software are still in use in some
| cases.
| ape4 wrote:
| Funny you mentioned 2003 since that's the exact version Ms
| Office I use ;)
| pharrington wrote:
| Somebody has to maintain the software, be it the devs or
| the end users.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Microsoft also makes Windows, and Windows takes backwards
| compatibility very seriously.
|
| Even if they don't work on maintaining Office 2003
| directly, they indirectly work very hard making sure every
| subsequent version of Windows does not break Office 2003.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| No, they are perfectly usable and functional even on
| Windows XP or Vista or 7 computers that haven't been
| touched or connected to the internet since 2012.
| xNeil wrote:
| That's not backward compatibility then - those are the
| systems it was made for (Windows 7 would then have been
| made backwards compatible for Office 2003).
|
| It's backward compatibility if Word 2003 runs on the
| later Windows versions - like Windows 10 and 11. I don't
| know the answer to that, but I'm sure someone here does.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Oh, I wasn't responding to the first point, of course
| Microsoft takes backward compatibility seriously.
|
| Though it's possible to mix and match so the OS backwards
| compatibility isn't the full story.
|
| i.e. a launch copy of Word 2003 works on later OS
| updates, yet the final patch version of Word 2003 also
| works on a 2009 launch copy of 7.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I mean, sure, this is what all the business books, MBAs have
| been saying since 60s.
|
| However, since then we have come to learn a _lot_ about
| software. The most important of which is that software, just
| like physical products, needs maintenance. The world is
| constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up
| otherwise it 'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the
| very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security
| threats.
|
| Just look at all the money/effort spent to make features
| backward compatible, or army of engineers employed by companies
| just to maintain existing software.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > At the very least it must be patched up with newly
| discovered security threats.
|
| I'd say at the very _most_ it needs security updates. Too
| much software changes just to change. UI redesigns for the
| sake of redesign, cramming features that nobody wants so a
| product owner can get promoted, adding telemetry and
| analytics to chase metrics that no user cares about, adding
| annoying notifications and popups to juice "engagement". I
| pine for the days of desktop software, where I can wake up in
| the morning and not be worried that some developer 1,000
| miles away from me changed my product out from under me
| because developers gotta develop.
|
| Another benefit of software that doesn't change every week is
| you can charge one time for it rather than these awful
| subscription pricing that most software are switching to.
| They justify subscriptions because "we have to keep paying
| developers to develop." Not a problem that the user has, so
| why should the user have to pay for it?
|
| Old, unchanged software is not obsolete. It's mature.
| Bugfixes only, please.
| mrlemke wrote:
| Why would I pay my developers to do bug fixes if you've
| only paid me once? Bug fixes are the user's problem, so why
| should I have to pay for it?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Companies can bake the cost of one or two maintenance
| releases and maybe one or two years of security releases
| into the purchase price. I agree it's not reasonable to
| expect lifetime updates from a one-time purchase. As long
| as you're not doing heavy development on these
| maintenance releases, the company's cost should be very
| small.
|
| As a user-developer, I'd also be happy with being
| provided the source (or un-linked object files, or the
| equivalent for whatever language being used) after the
| maintenance period was over, so I could continue applying
| dependency security patches myself.
| photonbeam wrote:
| Because you sold a defective product
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Depends on whether the bugs are because of preexisting
| flaws or because the underlying platform has shifted. No
| one can predict the future, and even OS vendors who once
| took backward compatibility seriously may not in the
| future.
| ghaff wrote:
| The design of MOST non-trivial products is refined over
| time with no expectation that older versions will be
| upgraded to the latest and greatest. Yes, material esp.
| safety defects can lead to recalls but this is relatively
| rare in the physical world.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > Another benefit of software that doesn't change every
| week is you can charge one time for it rather than these
| awful subscription pricing that most software are switching
| to.
|
| How do you pay developers to continuously fix bugs, provide
| security updates and update their software when the
| underlying hardware and operating system changes?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > How do you pay developers to continuously fix bugs,
| provide security updates and update their software when
| the underlying hardware and operating system changes?
|
| Have we really strayed so far that everyone's forgotten
| how this is done? Security fixes and serious bug fixes
| should always be free (At least going back N-1. You price
| that work into the sale price to begin with), and you get
| ongoing revenue by selling new versions.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And if the person is happy with the current version "n"
| that they were using, kept the same operating system
| while you released n+1 and n+2 to stay compatible with
| new operating systems then they decided to upgrade their
| hardware and find out that their old software doesn't
| work?
|
| They will still need to buy a new version or should that
| be free?
|
| If the author of BBEdit never added a feature since 1991.
| You would have still had to pay for new versions to run
| on your PPC/Classic MacOS, OS X PPC, x86 Mac and now your
| ARM Mac.
|
| Back in the "good old days" MS Office cost $595 for each
| version if you had a Mac and Windows PC.
|
| Now it's $99/year for five users and you can run on your
| Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, web, or Android device.
|
| The same for Photoshop.
|
| And you get continuous features added as the platform
| vendor and software vendor add more capabilities.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > and you get ongoing revenue by selling new versions
|
| This works exactly up until the moment that your software
| is good enough that most of your userbase stops paying to
| upgrade. Then you are dead in the water, and the software
| becomes abandonned by design.
| Frafabowa wrote:
| Obviously that's bad for businesses - but it's great for
| consumers! I think the question that's being asked is if
| there's some business model out there that delivers what
| customers want (the ability to just buy a finished
| product once and have it work decades down the line, like
| "pass it down to your kids" long) while also delivering
| profits to shareholders.
|
| There's a reason farmers want the ability to repair their
| own tractors without having to give John Deere an extra
| cut, you know.
| pc86 wrote:
| > if there's some business model out there that delivers
| what customers want ... while also delivering profits to
| shareholders.
|
| Of course there is, but that's why software in a box cost
| hundreds or _thousands_ of dollars per version, with
| minimal bug or security updates thereafter. The grass is
| always greener, yeah it 's a pain in the ass having a ton
| of $10/mo subscriptions. But I'd much rather have that -
| as both a consumer _and_ a developer - than have $800
| single-sale purchases.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How is it good for consumers to have abandoned software
| that is not compatible and never will be compatible with
| newer operating systems?
|
| Two decades ago, for instance Apple was still selling PPC
| based Macs.
| drbawb wrote:
| You emulate the abandonware, old OS and all. She kicked
| the habit recently, but my sister preferred Word 5.1 for
| Mac for a long time. That was a 68k program, which she
| dutifully used _on a PC_ while Apple was busy shipping
| iOS on ARM and Mac OS on x86. The Centris 610 is very
| tired, but the software still works. (Well, not the
| original copy. Those install floppies are _very dead._ )
| Software can be uniquely persistent, in a way physical
| artifacts can't, so why are we so insistent on keeping
| everyone on the upgrade treadmill?
|
| George R.R. Martin pretty famously uses WordStar on DOS.
| I can't imagine it'd be some win for consumers (either
| Martin personally, or downstream enjoyers of his books)
| if he had to be on the latest internet-connected, ad-
| infested, notification-riddled copy of Windows just so
| that his OS and Office Suite could repeatedly check to
| make sure he still has an active subscription and a valid
| "digital entitlement."
|
| I still use Office 2010. (Though it gets increasingly
| difficult to activate it, and it last received security
| updates in 2020.) In 2010 I was using x86_64 (an Athlon
| 64 X2), and today I'm using x86_64. Why should I upgrade?
| It happens to still run on Windows 11, but I'd gladly
| stuff it in a VM to continue using it. (I do use Office
| <current 365 build> for work, so I can pretty confidently
| say there is nothing worth paying for in there. The only
| feature even remotely interesting is PowerQuery for
| Excel, which is available as an add-in for Office 2010.)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Well, my wife uses one my 5 user Office 365 subscription
| licenses on her Mac. I use it on my iPad and phone. My
| mom uses it on her Windows laptop and her iPad.
|
| We each get 1TB of online storage.
|
| Compare that to the $599 that Office for Mac use to cost
| and that you could only use on one computer.
| dcow wrote:
| > Old, unchanged software is not obsolete. It's mature.
| Bugfixes only, please.
|
| This assumes a waterfall approach to development which
| implies multiple 6 month to year long development cycles.
|
| In reality, a mature stable project can receive monthly
| updates, and an immature half-working project can be in
| maintenance mode. Furthermore this may work for software
| that should be seen and not heard doing its job in the
| background without much user interaction, but for software
| that users interact with regularly, the design needs to be
| periodically refreshed to match current trends or users
| will leave for the newer sexier product with fewer
| features. We've seen this time and again. I have absolutely
| experienced a mature product that was "finished"
| (abandoned) like 4 OS version ago that just doesn't
| run/work on the current OS version because the platform has
| added new security controls, APIs, and/or UX expectations,
| etc. No amount of security updates would fix that.
|
| So while I understand where you're coming from opining for
| a world where we ship mature software and security updates
| only, I don't think it's remotely realistic given the way
| humans operate.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > In reality, a mature stable project can receive monthly
| updates
|
| Software that gets frequent updates isn't "mature and
| stable" by definition. It's constantly changing.
| luluthefirst wrote:
| In this context, stable means that it should not break,
| not that it will not be updated anymore. The term for
| what you are referring to is end-of-life.
| dcow wrote:
| > Software that gets frequent updates isn't "mature and
| stable" by definition. It's constantly changing.
|
| That's simply not universally true and it's incredibly
| naive to try and assert that it is. Obviously there are
| examples of immature unstable software that receives
| monthly updates, but it's not a tautology that monthly
| updates imply immaturity. You either don't work in
| software or haven't really thought this through.
|
| Stable means the software run reliably without major
| issues and mature means it is a solution well adapted to
| the problem domain and solves a problem with grace, tried
| and true. Monthly updates might be "integrate support for
| new technology/service (that didn't exist 6 months ago)"
| or "support latest changes in macOS 14" or even "fix
| issue that happens 0.01% of the time". _Other software
| changes_ and you have to adapt, and no software ships bug
| free. Being mature and stable means you have the time to
| work on things that aren 't existential for your
| product/business, like adding convenient support for some
| sexy new service as a nice value bump or making sure
| those 0.01% of your users aren't occasionally
| encountering an annoying or frustrating issue.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Even the security updates are often dubious. Software that
| could be entirely local (with a system provided filesystem
| backup/sync for data) adds "cloud" functionality so that it
| can lock you into the SaaS subscription model, and now it's
| got the network as an attack surface. It's self-justifying.
| Even there though, it generally just talks to the vendor's
| servers, and if you control the vendor's servers, you
| probably have more direct attack routes than some http
| client bug or some bug in an svg library that the vendor
| uses for their logo.
|
| "Security" patches are something only checklist-driven
| corporate IT (i.e. people who can't consider use-case)
| ought to care about. For individuals, they're mostly a
| cudgel to justify abusive practices and should be ignored.
| sanderjd wrote:
| So, this is true:
|
| > Too much software changes just to change.
|
| But it doesn't imply this:
|
| > I'd say at the very _most_ it needs security updates.
|
| What the parent said about "security updates at the very
| least" is correct, and _sometimes_ that happens to also be
| the very most updates that should be made. And sometimes it
| 's that but _a little bit more_. And sometimes it 's that
| and _a lot more_.
|
| The hard part is figuring out the right balance. And then,
| figuring out how to staff in order to achieve that balance.
|
| The "only security updates" approach turns out to be among
| the hardest to figure out how to staff for. Because the
| idea is that this software is essentially complete upon
| release, so the natural business model is to sell it that
| way, for a one-time fixed price. And then with that revenue
| structure, the natural cost structure is to move all the
| staffing to a new project (or to build these kinds of
| products with project-based contracts to begin with).
|
| But once you've accepted that you should at least be doing
| updates for security (and I think this is correct in almost
| all cases), well, now who is going to do those? You have a
| recurring cost with a non-recurring revenue stream. You can
| push down the recurring costs as far as possible, but
| eventually this model just struggles to pencil out. At that
| point, you'll probably decide to just stop all updates,
| including security patches.
|
| This phenomenon is why most people making software seek a
| business model with a recurring revenue stream. It's not an
| accident that the days of boxed software were also the days
| of rampant insecurity.
|
| _But_ , you're totally right that the next step in this is
| often, "well if we have to have ongoing staffing and
| recurring revenue, we need something for them to do besides
| maintenance, so let's do UI refreshes and metrics and stuff
| I guess". It's a test of leadership, to avoid that
| temptation. Better products have better leadership that is
| making better decisions about when it makes sense to do
| more on a product and when it makes sense to mostly leave
| it be.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| > "security updates at the very least" is correct, and
| sometimes that happens to also be the very most updates
| that should be made.
|
| And a lot of those updates wouldn't be necessary of
| software and tools wouldn't offer so much attack
| surfaces, that they wouldn't need if they cared less
| about those things as necessary features...
| swiftcoder wrote:
| The OS under your software is not static. MacOS programs
| from 10 years ago rarely execute successfully. Windows
| programs from 20 years ago might. Linux programs from 5
| years ago mostly don't unless you have access to source
| code (and a certain willingness to patch it yourself).
| pksebben wrote:
| > because developers gotta develop.
|
| You're touching on the real problem, here. Software isn't
| broken, it's just that the inherent issues in capital are
| starting to become painfully clear in this context.
|
| I've been trying to find a term for "behavior focused on
| maintaining your job when the need wouldn't exist without
| such behavior". It's kinda tangential to artificial
| scarcity but broader in scope, and if we don't have a term
| for it, we need one badly. So much of our society's
| resources are committed to solving problems that don't
| exist, because the actual problem is "you need money to
| live and for whatever reason the thing you do in the place
| and time you are isn't necessary or desired".
| rifty wrote:
| > I've been trying to find a term for "behavior focused
| on maintaining your job when the need wouldn't exist
| without such behavior"
|
| The concept of self-preservation or calling it
| superfluous self-preservation probably works here. But
| perhaps saying auto-preservation conveys better the
| sometimes lack of conscious intention that goes on in
| these situations.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| On the other hand, the reality experienced by software
| companies is that adding features is profitable. Joel
| Spolsky talks about this in one of his old blog posts[1]:
| "I can tell you that _nothing_ we have _ever_ done at Fog
| Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new
| version with more features. "
|
| It makes sense though, if software companies could make
| just as much money doing less work, they certainly would.
|
| [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| There's really nothing wrong with new features as long as
| you understand that there's a certain subset of users who
| don't want things to change. Maybe it's because people
| are already trained on the current version, or they don't
| want to have to upgrade machines just to run the new
| feature set, or any of a thousand reasons you may not
| have thought of.
|
| And then there are the "upgrades" that try to force you
| to pay more.
|
| There was a dev tool that I purchased a couple years ago.
| Don't remember the name. It was reasonably priced and
| came with 1 year of support. A bit over a year later I
| got a notification that they had put out an update, so I
| downloaded it to take a look, only to find out that it
| had deleted the version I had bought and my license
| wouldn't transfer over. If I didn't now buy this new
| version, not only could I not use it past the trial
| period, but I'd lost the version I had before.
|
| Yeah, I was pissed. And the company really had trouble
| understanding _why_ I was so pissed off by this behavior.
| I did finally find out where I could download the version
| I had before, but there went my entire workday. And the
| product that previously I would recommend became
| something I cautioned people to avoid!
| philistine wrote:
| The subset of people who don't want things to change are
| running which OS exactly? User interface is just like any
| other artistic field: it has fashion trends. Look at
| something that's been around forever and is still
| developed: BBEdit. Yeah sure the app has not changed a
| *ton*, but its changed more than you think. Many fads in
| OS X design (like drawers) had to be implemented and
| later removed.
|
| Any successful piece of software cannot realistically
| just stay still. It has to keep evolving with the trends
| of user interface. The difficult part is doing it well.
| BBEdit has managed it.
| sophacles wrote:
| >The subset of people who don't want things to change are
| running which OS exactly?
|
| All of them? Hell I hate it when things change in a way
| that forces me to give them attention _now_ rather than
| when I have time. Nothing worse than doing an update and
| having to rework my flow, scripts, and code just to be
| productive again. Let me choose when I update my tools,
| don 't force it on me just because your UI team found an
| even more complicated and torturous way to make simple
| things ugly and hard - I have my own work to do.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The problem is that you generally can't support yourself
| by just selling to existing customers; you need to keep
| selling to new customers.
|
| And the market keeps evolving, so you need to evolve with
| the market if you want to continue selling.
|
| If you do it slowly enough, and cautiously, then existing
| customers can adapt.
|
| But if you stop updating your app, it's eventually going
| to lose its appeal and will be forgotten.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I think this is kind of disproven by a feature that was
| added to Microsoft Word in the 1990s (I don't think it is
| still around, although I may be mistaken). It was called
| "WordArt" and let the user do things like write the word
| "shark" with the letters deformed so it looked like a
| picture of a shark. Why would you want to do this? I have
| no idea. It's just obvious that the people working on
| Microsoft Word needed to add _something_ and just bug
| fixes weren 't enough, I guess (although they still don't
| have a reference management system which is why things
| like EndNote still exist)
| pmcp wrote:
| I wonder if you are trolling or being serieus, because me
| and literally everyone i know would use this feature
| extensively. For powerpoints, school presentations,
| birthday cards. 50% of the time I fired up Word, it would
| be for that feature.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I seriously have never seen this used ever. But it sounds
| like you are talking about children using it, which I
| hadn't considered (I was already an adult in the 1990s).
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Are you kidding? That would actually make presentations
| fun again.
| dunham wrote:
| > I'd say at the very most it needs security updates.
|
| and then you move the bar a little (although I agree):
|
| > Bugfixes only, please.
|
| I would also add updating to work with the current OS /
| hardware. (I have unusable games that are a recompile away
| from being usable.)
|
| But I agree with the rest of your points. Especially when,
| in addition to asking you to fund new features, the new
| features make the app worse for your use cases.
|
| However I don't know if the root cause is more accurately
| described as "developers gotta develop" or "product
| managers gotta produce".
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I don't mean to target individual software
| developers here. "Developers gotta develop" is commentary
| on the entire industry, and all the contributors,
| including developers, UI designers, product owners, QA,
| executive sponsors. I remember hearing the saying
| "Programmers are like beavers. Leave a beaver alone to
| decide what to do and they'll just keep building dams,
| regardless of the fact that their home is done." I don't
| know if that's really true about beavers, but it's true
| about software organizations. The whole software
| development team will just continue working on the
| software even long past the point where they're done.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| Software compatibility with current modern platforms is a
| feature, and an owner of software isn't entitled to
| forward compatibility any more than an owner of a car is
| entitled to new parts as the old ones degrade.
|
| Software degradation is much like hardware degradation:
| it happens with time as underlying platforms change.
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| Software "maintenance" is kind of a self-fulfilling
| prophecy. It's not required to break the old in order to
| make something new, but unchecked scope creep results in
| what used to work not working anymore, and thus the
| artificial need for maintenance.
| paulddraper wrote:
| The reason that desktop world existed is because computing
| was very localized.
|
| Now people use it in very interconnected ways.
| chefandy wrote:
| But interface updates _do_ meaningfully help many people.
|
| Most people in engineering roles think the job is done when
| the engineering is done, and the maintenance is unnecessary
| unless it's necessary for stability or security. That's not
| limited to software, either. The fact is, to the vast
| majority of non-developer software users, an improved
| workflow, more intuitive, or yes, even more attractive
| interface makes more of a difference than moderate
| performance upgrades or minor stability improvements.
|
| To a developer, interfaces are a way to interact with with
| software, like an API for humans. To everyone else, the
| interface _is_ the software. Old interfaces are as or more
| usable to _you_ because _you_ have a sophisticated mental
| model of software and a high tolerance for logical
| complexity. These dreaded designers ' profession is
| figuring out how people who don't have those things can
| most easily solve their problem with the tool you built.
|
| Car controls would look a lot different if the engineers
| maintained control over the available controls without
| designer input. They might intuitively understand that the
| array of controls that change fuel injection parameters
| should only be used in certain instances, but they liked
| having them _right there_ just in case. When told that they
| 'd just confuse average drivers and should probably be
| hidden, they might argue, "I explained to my 6 year old
| nephew how more or less air can affect engine preformance."
| Multiply that by the dozen internal systems they want to
| control or get real time data from. A designer world
| recognize that this would confuse most drivers for little
| benefit and hide everything but the things most drivers
| need to find and parse instantly... And they would be met
| with the same heavy sighs and eyerolls that software
| designers regularly get from developers.
|
| Designers are in the organization because they can do
| things that developers can't. They make developers work
| vastly more useful to the world because the way someone
| solves their problem is as or more important than it being
| optimally solved using the smallest amount of available
| resources with 5 9s of reliability instead of 3.
|
| And that's why, in the overwhelming majority of cases, end-
| user-facing commercial software with professionally
| designed UIs and someone looking at UX on a whole will
| dominate FOSS alternatives while tools targeted at
| developers and other technical people do as well or better,
| and the commercial equivalents.
| squid_fm wrote:
| Without solid designers most software would be completely
| unusable to the majority of people.
|
| It is really easy to get caught in the trap that YOU are
| the end-user, but a couple user interviews will quickly
| shatter that reality.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years
|
| I mean, sure, this is what all the software developers have
| been saying...
|
| In the meantime, I'm constantly seeing users, even here on
| HN, complaining about how their favorite software tools are
| changing. Users the world over annoyed at SaaS, and pining
| for installable software that they can just put on a machine
| and never have to worry about forced upgrades or annual
| maintenance fees, etc., or even the convenience of not
| needing an internet connection for it to work.
|
| The software world has never been black and white. There are
| product niches, and also use-case niches. You could probably
| make a good business by choosing something that's only
| available as SaaS and releasing a local-only version of it.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| We build power electronics and our machines also have lots of
| software in them. People that only work in software have no
| idea what a difference a software bug is compared to a
| hardware bug. Things we can solve in software means someone
| remotes into the machine and goes home to their family at the
| end of the day. Hardware problems usually means the engineer
| goes home packs a bag, gets a plane ticket, is away from the
| family for a week and hopefully we figured out remotely,
| correctly what the real issue is. I did two transatlantic
| flights this year because there was an issue with a >$5
| component on a circuit board.
| rightbyte wrote:
| If your software need security maintainance it mostly has a
| failed architecture from the get go.
|
| Like 9/10 apps need no internet connectivity at all, unless
| they are spyware of course, which most commercial apps are
| nowadays.
| johnny99k wrote:
| "If your software need security maintainance it mostly has
| a failed architecture from the get go."
|
| There are plenty of open source libraries, that many
| software developers used in their applications, that have
| had to have security updates. No software will be 100%
| secure.
|
| "Like 9/10 apps need no internet connectivity at all"
|
| This might have been true 10 years ago. Almost all apps
| people want need internet connectivity.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Software that does not interact with remote computers is
| 100% secure. You just got the risk when loading malicious
| save files or what ever, but the floppy disk kind of
| viruses is a whole other level of security risk and the
| user need to load the files. It doesn't just happen (I
| know some Windows computers could get infected by merely
| plugging in some USB stick, but you get my point).
|
| The whole connectivity thing is the fundamental problem.
| Transferring files between devices have never been as
| easy as during the floppy disk days. Usability is not the
| driving factor behind forcing the internet into
| everything.
| TheMode wrote:
| The problem then isn't that people refuse to pay for
| software, but that it needs permanent maintenance. Feels like
| a lot of busy-work.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Maintenance costs are (mostly) not marginal though - it's not
| more expensive to maintain something if more users are using
| it.
|
| Take into account maintenance when pricing your software.
| causi wrote:
| _otherwise it 'll become obsolete within couple of years. At
| the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered
| security threats._
|
| Only if it talks to the internet. I have plenty of software I
| downloaded over a decade ago that has no internet access and
| runs perfectly fine on Windows 11. Much of it is even older
| than that. Just stop trying to cram social media integration
| into your label-making program and it gets a lot easier.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > only if it talks to the internet
|
| So.... Most software.
|
| Agreed
| JohnFen wrote:
| Probably depends on the user, honestly. Most of the
| software I use doesn't need to talk to the internet. A
| lot of it _wants_ to, but that 's a different thing.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| It may be an unpopular opinion, but most of that software
| should just live in the browser if it's actually reliant
| on the cloud.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software
| has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple
| of years.
|
| There's some truth to this, but I think this factor is
| usually dramatically overstated. At least, most of the
| software I use doesn't need to constantly change. The
| majority of software updates I see are unnecessary, and many
| of them are undesirable.
| themadturk wrote:
| A company I worked for 12 years ago was using a version of
| Microsoft Navision (now Microsoft Dynamics or something).
| They hadn't upgraded for several years. Upgrading would
| have meant a bunch of workstations would have needed to use
| newer versions of Windows beyond XP. Navision was largely
| unsupported (only by a consultant, not by MS) and of course
| the workstations were dangerously behind (yes, we were
| definitely on the internet). But to the users and the owner
| of the company, everything was working. We had very few
| problems...EDI was coming in and going out, packages were
| packed and shipped, inventory and accounting were up to
| date. It felt to me like things were held together with
| chewing gum and duct tape, and we were one hard drive
| failure from disaster, but from the company's bottom line,
| nothing was broken.
|
| I left before they upgraded anything, and they're still in
| business, so I guess it worked out. But it proves that not
| everything has to change to continue to work.
| zokier wrote:
| > The most important of which is that software, just like
| physical products, needs maintenance. The world is constantly
| changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise
| it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very
| least it must be patched up with newly discovered security
| threats.
|
| I feel this is largely being overstated point, or rather that
| in reality majority of important patches for software is due
| shoddy quality of it originally rather than external changes.
| Most security issues are rehashes of common well-known
| attacks rather than completely novel discoveries. Especially
| on desktop the platform churn is pretty low, windows happily
| runs like decades old binaries, and on Linux desktop we have
| this one major breakage happening that is Wayland but
| otherwise well-written decades old code is at least source
| compatible if not binary compatible (although even that is
| not that far-fetched...).
| shon wrote:
| Software margins are good, especially compared to physical
| things. However, the marginal cost is far from zero. It scales
| with # and variety of users. Today, all software comes with
| complex dependencies.
|
| Take for example any mobile app. Apps require constant upgrades
| to keep up with the hardware and software changes on the
| platforms. You can't just build an iPhone app and leave it
| alone to be enjoyed by people. I've tried, within a year or two
| there will be changes that require developer work, if you don't
| keep it maintained, it will start to crash and function poorly,
| Apple, for example, tracks everything and will start with de-
| boosting search results for your app and end with removing it
| from the platform entirely.
|
| Google is the same. I've tried, I built a Top 25 RPG and got
| busy with other things. It went from Top 25 to deplatformed in
| less 5 years because unmaintained software just doesn't work in
| most cases today.
|
| Software is more complex now. All software is a conglomeration
| of lots of other software: frameworks, platform tools,
| libraries, APIs, etc.
|
| Another example: Flash
|
| Another example: All the AI software being written on top of
| the OpenAI API will be broken in a year or two as they roll new
| versions of the API and deprecate the old.
|
| Software doesn't just work anymore. The platform that executes
| it is constantly changing.
| david422 wrote:
| > You can't just build an iPhone app and leave it alone to be
| enjoyed by people. I've tried, within a year or two there
| will be changes that require developer work, if you don't
| keep it maintained, it will start to crash and function
| poorly
|
| My favorite is when a new Apple update breaks your app, so
| you identify where the issue is and make a small update, but
| now Apple rejects your update because of some other arbitrary
| guidelines it's changed, so you then have to start down that
| rabbit hole.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Software doesn't just work anymore. The platform that
| executes it is constantly changing.
|
| It depends on the software. But where this is true, it's not
| because of some innate nature of software, it's because of
| business decisions software companies have made.
| hinkley wrote:
| This logic has always bothered me a little and I've never
| understood why, until recently.
|
| The fact of marginal cost results in a lot of software being
| written that otherwise never would have been. After all, the
| difficulty of solving a problem for myself often doesn't offset
| the trouble of making a reusable solution. It's only through
| having other people use it or pay for it that it becomes
| worthwhile.
|
| Randall Munroe's chart is incomplete because it thinks too
| locally.
| cscheid wrote:
| > Software has no marginal cost.
|
| Maybe you've never experienced the difference between writing
| software for 1000 people and writing software for 1M people, or
| (I imagine) 1B. The marginal per-person cost of software is not
| on shipping. It's on "what kind of weird shit will I now have
| to do because 1M is a lot of chances for my software to break
| weirdly, and people have paid for it"
|
| > You don't have to worry about quality control and returns.
|
| You don't have to worry about quality control and returns if
| you don't care about quality control or returns.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| I suspect it's less about chances to break due to dice rolls
| and more chances to not meet the feature/requirements that
| change based on varying contexts of users, which create a lot
| of legal and integration and reqs which require lots of code
| and maintenance.
| chromoblob wrote:
| As N of people - [?], chances for software to break - finite
| maximum. And for good enough software you should consider
| that maximum already regardless of the number of users.
| cscheid wrote:
| > And for good enough software you should consider that
| maximum already for any number of users.
|
| I don't believe such software exists. (And, to be clear,
| I'm writing from direct, day-job experience.)
|
| EDIT: I take it back. SQLite, cURL. Maybe.
|
| EDIT2: I can't reply to the SEL4 response, so here goes.
| I'm a huge fan of verification tools, but consider the
| Spectre class of bugs. Verification is always done wrt a
| mathematical model that you've defined after inspecting the
| world and writing down the properties you want to track.
| But the world changes, and the chance that the world
| changes increases with the number of users of your
| software. That's the nature of the beast.
| chromoblob wrote:
| seL4 is a formally verified OS kernel.
| https://sel4.systems/About/
| chromoblob wrote:
| Spectre is a bug in the processor, not in the software. I
| agree that when you're stuck with unfinalized buggy
| processors, adding mitigations in software is reasonable.
| But the processor could be finalized too.
|
| When I had a reply I couldn't reply to, I opened the
| reply separately in a new tab, and there I could reply to
| it, try this.
| cscheid wrote:
| > Spectre is a bug in the processor, not in the software.
|
| It's a bug in the processor that causes a bug in the
| software. It's not a bug in your idealized mathematical
| model, but try telling that to the people who paid you
| not to leak private keys.
|
| I see my job as an engineer to be to create a product
| that satisfies the user's expectations (which in this
| case are eminently reasonable). It matters not one bit
| that I can point the finger to the chipmakers. I'm still
| selling something that I now learned doesn't do what I
| said it would. It's still on me to fix it the best I can.
| If I care about the product quality, that is.
| chromoblob wrote:
| The program must not show bugs when run on a hardware
| with unforeseeable bugs, you call this reasonable?
| thfuran wrote:
| If you buy a car and the airbags randomly deploy, would
| you consider it reasonable for the manufacturer to
| respond "oh, yeah, that'll happen if you drive it on
| roads rougher than polished stainless steel. You should
| only be driving on polished roadways"?
| chromoblob wrote:
| If this requirement was known to me before I bought,
| sure.
|
| I think that this is a bad analogy to hardware, though.
| Polished steel roads are unreasonable to ask for, but
| bugless processors are reasonable to ask for.
| thfuran wrote:
| No, they aren't. You can only buy the buggy processors
| that exist, not notional bugless ones.
| cscheid wrote:
| And yet that's what every good engineer did when Spectre
| came out. Same with the Pentium fdiv bugs, and same with
| a host of microcode bugs that come up all the time.
|
| Not my business to decide what you think is reasonable.
| That's just what happens in the world, and what (in my
| view) good engineers sign up for.
| chromoblob wrote:
| The choice is between letting hardware be not finalized
| and letting that force software to be non-finalizable,
| and letting software be finalizable and forcing the
| hardware to be finalized too. I like latter more.
| Finalized hardware is better by itself as well.
| cscheid wrote:
| > The choice
|
| What choice? I have to fix bugs today as they come.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| We would all like bug-free hardware, but we won't get it
| and our job is to write good software in the environment
| we were given
| chromoblob wrote:
| > we won't get it
|
| Why do you think so?
| hinkley wrote:
| An important philosophical observation is that in a world
| of 7 billion people, "miracles" are happening to thousands
| of people every day.
|
| I'm software we deal more with curses than miracles. Those
| happen every day too.
| ysavir wrote:
| That's applicable to websites, where you have to handle
| requests from all your users, and more users means more
| requests to handle.
|
| But if we're talking about plain old regular software,
| something that needs no server to operate, and functions
| perfectly fine offline, something like, say, Photoshop, how
| different is the impact on the manufacturer when the software
| is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users?
|
| Yes, having 1M or 1B users means more opportunities for the
| bugs to surface and for people do be upset with the product.
| But do those scenarios impact the quality of the product for
| other users? Does they introduce unseen costs to the
| manufacturer? Do they make the product unprofitable or
| unsuccessful in anyway? Or does it mean that the manufacturer
| will have to refund 0.1% of their sales, and only benefit
| from the 99.9% of sales where the product worked as expected?
| hinkley wrote:
| Even when customers run software on their own machines, you
| have to deal with bugs that only occur in rare occasions
| because your giant user base finds them all. Plus now
| you're running in unknowable environments that you have to
| debug via telephone (the object or the children's game or
| both).
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| Beyond bugs, scaling your MVP to 1B users will mean
| expanding your userbase beyond English speaking Americans.
| This requires upgrades to internationalization,
| accessibility, possibly compliance with international laws
| and 3rd party licensing changes per region. Multilingual
| support staff and international payments processing. With a
| userbase this large, expect to be sued by people around the
| world, so you'll need region-specific legal services. Some
| of these issues just require money and non-technical staff
| and don't directly impact the user experience aside from
| diverting resources away from building features and fixing
| bugs for your original userbase.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| There are apparently 2B English speakers in the world, so
| you could in principle get away with no
| internationalization and have 1B users. The other things
| are more a cost of operating a multi-national business,
| and not a marginal cost of the software as such. You
| could also in principle scale to ~300M users (or ~100M
| households) without worrying about international issues
| by sticking to the US only.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Just because someone speaks some English, doesn't mean
| that they wouldn't prefer to use software in their native
| language.
|
| Try selling English-only software in Europe and you
| generally won't get very far.
| ysavir wrote:
| Sure, but these aren't business model problems, they're
| business growth problems. The concern wasn't how to find
| 1B users in the world (and what do you have to do to get
| their money), it's whether scaling to 1B users inherently
| breaks the product, not just for individual users, but
| for all users.
|
| If a company was only able to sell 2.6M copies of their
| digital software before running to expansion problems...
| good for them! That's a lot of sales and they probably
| made a great deal off of those sales. Sure, they can grow
| to 1B users, but they don't have to. There's no
| requirement for them to do that other than _choosing_ to
| expand into those markets, and that 's strictly optional.
| The business model is doing fine, there's no need to
| adopt a recurring payment system for ongoing maintenance.
|
| And let's be honest, even if they do choose to expand
| into those other markets, the cost to convert the
| existing product to work in those markets is most likely
| less than the money they'll earn from selling in those
| markets, so... is there really a need for recurring
| payments to support maintenance? Will one-payment sale
| structures inherently fail to make the product profitable
| in a given market?
| hinkley wrote:
| You can tell the people who have never run a business or
| have worked at one small enough that they see everything.
| Support staff are not free. Project managers and
| salespeople can't keep up with meetings and start
| sprouting assistants and coworkers. Customers are
| expensive, especially upset customers. So then the
| developers have to spend a lot more time making sure
| customers don't get upset.
| cscheid wrote:
| > how different is the impact on the manufacturer when the
| software is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users?
|
| _very different_, when the user's environment is different.
| And 1) you haven't seen shit if you think you can perfectly
| control the user's environment. 2) every new user is a
| chance for the environment to bite you.
|
| > Do they make the product unprofitable or unsuccessful in
| anyway?
|
| You do your engineer best to try and fight that. But
| there's absolutely a marginal cost, which is what I was
| responding to.
| ysavir wrote:
| > _very different_, when the user's environment is
| different. And 1) you haven't seen shit if you think you
| can perfectly control the user's environment. 2) every
| new user is a chance for the environment to bite you.
|
| Can you provide some examples of this? I'd like more info
| here, because off of the top of my head, I can think of
| the following counter-examples:
|
| 1. This isn't a new problem. User environment has been an
| issue ever since software as an industry was born.
| Specifying minimum specs is a pretty typical thing. And
| while I don't have depth of knowledge on these challenges
| or their history, my understanding is that it's only
| become less of a factor over time. So why is digital
| software different in this regard? If the industry was
| able to sustain itself before it went digital, what about
| the change to digital makes it unsustainable now?
|
| 2. Computer games, which are probably a good candidate
| for the most resource-heavy programs that need an
| appropriate environment, still largely adhere to a pay
| once business model. Doesn't this indicate that offline
| experiences aren't affected by environment to such a
| degree that a single payment business model isn't
| problematic?
|
| > You do your engineer best to try and fight that. But
| there's absolutely a marginal cost, which is what I was
| responding to.
|
| It surely has a marginal cost. But is that cost
| significant, is the question. In particular, significant
| enough to warrant a recurring payment business model.
| cscheid wrote:
| > It surely has a marginal cost. But is that cost
| significant, is the question. In particular, significant
| enough to warrant a recurring payment business model.
|
| I think you're assuming more of my answer than what I
| gave. That's fair given that this is the point of the
| article, but it's not mine. I'm very specifically only
| responding to "is there a per-user marginal cost on
| software?", and my answer is most definitely yes.
|
| To warrant a recurring payment business model, I think
| the right question to ask is "Is there a per user-year
| marginal cost on software?", and now the answer is in my
| view, much more complicated and domain-specific. Worse
| yet, I think that there's perverse incentives at play
| here in recurring payments.
| ysavir wrote:
| > I think you're assuming more of my answer than what I
| gave. That's fair given that this is the point of the
| article, but it's not mine. I'm very specifically only
| responding to "is there a per-user marginal cost on
| software?", and my answer is most definitely yes.
|
| Fair, but I feel it's disingenuous to ignore the context
| the original comment was written in (the context of the
| article) and try to argue against a specific point in the
| post as if it was made without that original context. The
| sentence may have lacked inherent context, but it was
| supporting the key points the GP was making in response
| to the article. It wasn't designed to stand alone.
|
| Given, I'm not the author of that post so entirely
| possible they _were_ intending for it to stand alone, but
| I think it would still be better to see if that was
| intent rather than to assume so and antagonize what they
| were saying.
| thfuran wrote:
| >But if we're talking about plain old regular software,
| something that needs no server to operate, and functions
| perfectly fine offline
|
| The main product at work is a desktop application. That
| means that every OS version / hardware configuration of
| every platform that any user might install it on can have
| its own bugs. It means that we support multiple major
| versions rather than being able to just always deploy the
| latest version. It means that a user might want to have
| multiple versions of the software installed side-by-side on
| the same machine. It doesn't change the fact that more
| users means more use cases.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > But do those scenarios impact the quality of the product
| for other users?
|
| Absolutely. Anything involving internationalization is an
| open invitation for _very_ weird edge cases. Some languages
| (Hebrew!) are written right-to-left, some require more than
| one byte to store (Japanese, Chinese), time formats and
| time zones vary, some write currencies with the symbol in
| the front (US dollar) and some at the end (Euro).
|
| If all your testing was done by Americans speaking English,
| the only thing you may stumble upon is timezones. If you're
| in Europe, timezones won't be much of an issue (as almost
| everyone is on CET), but you may find out that, whoops,
| Windows localizes certain path elements like C:\Users.
|
| On top of that, a constant pain point in support is
| displays. Most Windows users are on a 1080p screen on their
| laptop, but may plug in their new 4K monitor and notice
| that your UI is completely illegible because it doesn't
| respect DPI settings. Or you thought you supported variable
| DPI, but never planned on a user stretching your window
| across two screens with different DPI settings. Or monitors
| use different color profiles or gamma settings and users
| complaining about that.
| hinkley wrote:
| Software has a somewhat inverse relationship to scale as
| manufacturing. For manufacturing the first one costs
| millions, and each one after costs hundreds for a time. As
| you get better you winnow away the equipment or maintenance
| costs and prices drop.
|
| Software use cases experience combinatorics, and almost all
| useful algorithms have log(n) runtime. Even when Knuth says
| they are O(1), physics or EE say he's wrong. There are no
| economies of scale. Racks don't get cheaper when you run out
| of network ports. Cooling doesn't get cheaper when you run
| out of roof. Things that failed one time in a million calls
| now happen every hour instead of twice a month, and actually
| have to be fixed.
|
| It's death by a million cuts.
| j45 wrote:
| Software can be easier than physical products if kept simple,
| because the complexity arrives on it's own anyways.
|
| Each line of code is a burden of future maintenance.
| sharemywin wrote:
| This completely ignores the cost of support.
|
| - How does this feature work?
|
| - How does the software do this?
|
| - you said it does this and it doesn't why?
|
| - can make the software do this?
|
| Each one of these questions cost money to answer and needs
| someone to hand hold the user. especially if they are a non-
| technical business user.
| supportengineer wrote:
| In software you can make an excellent product and still fail,
| sadly.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The problem with software's non-physical nature is that it has
| runaway market dominance issues. Software, especially software
| that interacts with other software, tends to be _either_ open-
| source maintained by a "community" _or_ a thinly veiled world
| domination plan.
| prepend wrote:
| That's a feature, not a bug, I think.
|
| Low barrier to entry is really important for new software. So
| it's this struggle with some orgs trying to increase lock-in
| (Microsoft, Oracle, etc) and a constant stream of new
| products taking off, dominating the world, and getting
| knocked off themselves.
| amelius wrote:
| > Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any
| physical product.
|
| This is exactly why people should pay for software: consumption
| of physical goods destroys the planet. Money spent on software
| can't be spent on destroying the environment.
|
| Ban ads*, make people pay for content and software and save the
| planet. Win-win-win.
|
| * most of them anyways
| davidw wrote:
| Software is mostly a non-rivalrous good:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics) although it
| becomes a little bit more that way when it's hosted, rather
| than distributed via downloads or something, depending on the
| load it puts on a server.
|
| It is excludable, but more so with SaaS type things:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > still blows my mind how much easier it is to run a business
| that deals with bytes instead of atoms
|
| That must be why most software startups succeed.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > In software the hard part is making an excellent product
|
| I'd argue in _all domains_ , the hard part is making an
| excellent product.
|
| There are virtually zero real-world constraints you can
| leverage as excuses in the domain of software, other than the
| original idea was bad or you have really bad people around the
| idea. Most of the software ideas I have encountered in my
| career are fantastic. It's not hard to describe what a high
| quality product experience is like if you are a domain expert
| and have suffered the gauntlet for 30+ years. The part that
| always seems to go straight to hell is the implementation of
| the idea.
|
| I suspect most software projects go bad because there are too
| many layers of separation between participants. In physical
| products, substantially more direct interaction is required to
| get things done. With software products, you can isolate
| everyone into different multiverses as long as they are pushing
| PRs to the same GitHub repo (and sometimes not even the repo is
| shared...). Over time, these silos ultimately ruin any sense of
| ownership and quality in the product.
|
| It is quite tragic - while on one hand software is the most
| accessible form of human enterprise ever, it is also the
| easiest to do wrong. Having no constraints seems like win-win
| at first, but it is absolutely a double-edged sword. In my
| view, the best software company CTOs are the ones who
| intentionally add as many artificial constraints as they can to
| the technology and process. Do more with less. Force lateral
| thinking. Make the product people go back to the customer and
| say things like "we actually can't do that because of a
| technology policy" instead of pretending like an unlimited
| infinity of things is always possible.
| icepat wrote:
| > You don't have to worry about quality control
|
| I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, as a large part of
| software development is QA testing, and validation. Which is a
| form of quality control.
| dboreham wrote:
| Parent means quality control in the context of the supply
| chain. Still wrong imho, since you need to at least maintain
| a zip file in someone's CDN, and those folks have to maintain
| their CDN QoS.
| labcomputer wrote:
| When you manufacture the physical widget, manufacturing
| tolerances mean that not every widget is the same. There are
| variations in the as-produced widgets.
|
| You need a QA/QC process to identify units which are too far
| out of tolerance and either remove them from the pipeline or
| remediate them. You also need to track trends in the measured
| tolerances to proactively fix your production equipment.
|
| In the software world, that's trivially easy. Your CI pipe
| publishes an artifact and then every user gets a bit-perfect
| copy of that artifact. Your entire QC is just: Users compare
| the artifact's checksum to the expected checksum. It
| essentially always matches because we use things like TCP to
| copy the data.
|
| The type of QA you're talking about is also required for
| physical widgets.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Yes. Software is a low-capital business and many people in tech
| don't want to believe it.
|
| A few offices, macbooks, and data center space is very cheap
| compared to building a manufacturing plant.
|
| On the other side, what tech people understand that the general
| public does not... is that software has a healthy dose of
| maintenance and operational costs when it scales. Not a
| _massive_ cost, but higher than zero - which is what most MBAs
| think the maintenance cost is.
| gmerc wrote:
| In an industry full of unchecked monopolists, piracy takes the
| role of providing the a reasonable price ceiling at which
| people switch away from bad but monopolized products
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| I usually consider myself a decently smart individual but damnit
| this has me questioning that...
|
| I read through your landing page and your how-it-works page and I
| am still...confused. That it ends on a hand wavey "we haven't
| solved this part yet" statement does not inspire confidence.
|
| As best I can tell you are going to take a lot of open software
| and gatekeep it behind a paywall but each user only has to pay
| once...to someone...and then they can access all of the software
| behind that gate. So you are trying to make an ecosystem of
| software that can only be accessed by people that have paid some
| money at least once?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I considered myself normal functioning, but after reading the
| landing page I think a few braincells just hanged themselves
| robalni wrote:
| This is my project, so if you have questions, I can answer them
| in this thread.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| I feel like the overall system should be clearer. For instance
| it's not clear how the developers get credits or whether
| developer accounts are somehow authenticated as representing a
| genuine entity.
|
| In the opening statement of the site the idea of merely
| trusting the user without copy protection is completely
| ignored, but without more details it's not clear if the
| proposed system is any better.
| rifty wrote:
| - What do you expect open source developers to charge at
| minimum for access to the catalog in order to make this make
| sense to do at all?
|
| If people subscribe once and access everything, it seems like
| they'd need to charge a lot to make it a worthwhile co-op to
| participate in. It feels like the amount they would have to
| charge would become pretty financially restrictive to access
| the code and not in the interests of someone who wanted to open
| source in the first place...
|
| - How does this handle the scenario of a developer
| disappearing?
|
| Does everyone who had access through that developer continue to
| have access?
|
| It seems since payment processing is handled by individual
| developers, no longer would people have to pay for access to
| the whole catalog. Does this now mean over the long term you
| are handling an ever increase supply of people with access who
| do not pay but can transfer their access to others for free?
|
| - How does this handle the scenario of developers with
| subscribers who are supposed to pay a reoccurring payment but
| have stopped?
|
| Does the developer have the ability to remove access to the
| catalog from specific subscribers?
|
| If the developers have the ability to remove subscribers at
| will, doesn't this disincentivize paying at all because paying
| gives you no security in your access you just bought? What is
| your plan to arbitrate this without access to primary payment
| information to confirm who is right?
|
| - It seems like although decentralized, this approximates to
| the journal model but for code? Is this your intention?
| robalni wrote:
| > - What do you expect open source developers to charge at
| minimum for access to the catalog in order to make this make
| sense to do at all?
|
| > If people subscribe once and access everything, it seems
| like they'd need to charge a lot to make it a worthwhile co-
| op to participate in.
|
| I have thought about this a bit and yes, when this thing
| grows, the subscriptions will be worth more and more. I
| haven't really done any calculations though because it's
| really hard to know what things will be like. Anyway, let's
| try one:
|
| Let's say there are 100 developers (individuals) and a
| developer wants $4000 per month. Then if we want a
| subscription to be $5 per month or maybe we could allow it to
| be $10, the number of subscribers per developer would have to
| be 100 * 4000 / 10 / 100 or just 4000/10 = 400. So I guess as
| long as the number of subscribers are a few hundreds times
| more than the number of developers (individuals), it could
| work.
|
| > - How does this handle the scenario of a developer
| disappearing?
|
| Interesting question; I have not thought about that.
| Developers register and unregister the subscriptions so
| hopefully they would unregister their subscriptions before
| they disappear. If they don't do that, it could be forced by
| the system but there would have to be rules about that then
| so everybody knows what will happen.
|
| > Does the developer have the ability to remove access to the
| catalog from specific subscribers?
|
| Yes, they can register and unregister subscriptions as much
| as they want.
|
| > If the developers have the ability to remove subscribers at
| will, doesn't this disincentivize paying at all because
| paying gives you no security in your access you just bought?
| What is your plan to arbitrate this without access to primary
| payment information to confirm who is right?
|
| That is between the buyer and the seller. If you buy
| something and you don't get what you bought, you would try to
| solve that with the seller. Of cource people can complain to
| 1Sub too and then maybe the other developers will lose trust
| in that developer and they can be kicked out.
|
| > - It seems like although decentralized, this approximates
| to the journal model but for code? Is this your intention?
|
| I have not thought much about the journal model but I can see
| how this is similar. My main vision has been tax that
| everyone who wants to be a citizen pays so that they then can
| enjoy things that are not sold directly to people.
| Kinrany wrote:
| Why would developers use this over just asking for money?
|
| What are you going to do about people asking for 1 cent to join
| the network?
| robalni wrote:
| > Why would developers use this over just asking for money?
|
| More people should want to pay if they use this system
| because if you just ask for money, you either don't give
| anything in return (donations) or you give access to your
| stuff, but with this system, the user gets access to
| everything that uses this system.
|
| > What are you going to do about people asking for 1 cent to
| join the network?
|
| Developers can sell subscriptions for 1 cent but since they
| have a limited number of subscriptions to sell, they will not
| make a lot of money that way.
|
| If you mean 1 cent to join as a developer, that is free; it's
| about trust. This should be a cooperation between developers
| who trust each other.
| Kinrany wrote:
| > limited number of subscriptions to sell
|
| Oh, I don't remember the website mentioning this. How does
| this work, and what are the implications?
| robalni wrote:
| > Oh, I don't remember the website mentioning this. How
| does this work, and what are the implications?
|
| You can read about it here (bottom):
| https://1sub.dev/about/how-it-works
|
| It means that there is a supply/demand that influences
| what price the subscriptions can be sold for. Developers
| have a limited number of "credits" that can be turned
| into subscriptions. They can get more credits by making
| people subscribe through their links. There is also a
| plan that the credits will be multiplied and grow with
| time in order to keep the prices on a sane level.
| bronxpockfabz wrote:
| > As a developer you sell subscriptions independently; you set
| the price, handle the money and do all of the interactions with
| the customer. Then you register the subscription in the system
| by using a simple API.
|
| What prevents me, as a rogue actor, from just adding all my
| mates to the database without them paying me anything? Would
| they get access to all other software from the developers who
| take part in this affair?
| robalni wrote:
| > What prevents me, as a rogue actor, from just adding all my
| mates to the database without them paying me anything? Would
| they get access to all other software from the developers who
| take part in this affair?
|
| If you are not a trusted developer in the system then the API
| key prevents you.
|
| If you are a trusted developer, then you can give away as
| many subscriptions for free as you like but you only have a
| limited number of subscriptions to sell so you will not make
| as much money that way.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| So someone can subscribe to a 0.99/month product and use
| several 19.99/month products?
| robalni wrote:
| > So someone can subscribe to a 0.99/month product and use
| several 19.99/month products?
|
| Yes, a developer can sell the subscriptions for very cheap
| but then they will probably quickly run out of subscriptions
| (there is a limited number) and then wish they had sold them
| for more.
|
| Also, the subscription is not really tied to any product;
| think of it more as a subscription to free software in
| general, that can be sold by different resellers (the
| developers).
| spuz wrote:
| The whole website is very confusing. Why would a user want to
| subscribe to only one developer? Why does subscribing to one
| developer give access to all developers? Why not put yourself
| in the middle and offer a subscription to "1Sub.dev" and give
| users the same benefits?
|
| What does it mean to "give access to downloads and other
| resources"? What kind of downloads and resources?
|
| Can you give some examples of services that exist that you
| think don't work well enough?
| robalni wrote:
| > Why would a user want to subscribe to only one developer?
|
| Subscribing to one is easier than subscribing to many. There
| is less friction and the user gets more for that
| subscription.
|
| > Why does subscribing to one developer give access to all
| developers?
|
| All developers (and everyone else) can add subscription
| checks to whatever they like that will let only subscribers
| pass.
|
| > Why not put yourself in the middle and offer a subscription
| to "1Sub.dev" and give users the same benefits?
|
| Then they would all have to pay me. I don't want that.
| Someone could have something against paying me. Maybe the
| payment methods I offer doesn't work for someone.
| Distributing payments seems like the only right thing to do.
|
| > What does it mean to "give access to downloads and other
| resources"? What kind of downloads and resources?
|
| It could be anything. Here is an example of a paywall for
| this comments page that will only let subscribers follow the
| link: https://1sub.dev/link?u=https://news.
| ycombinator.com/item?id%3D&s=p_GonuAYEe0&k=&n=hK5ZOXymlHi5s2E
| s&a=a.18
|
| > Can you give some examples of services that exist that you
| think don't work well enough?
|
| I don't know what kind of services you mean.
| spuz wrote:
| I'm very confused about how the distributed payment system
| would work. How much would a subscription cost for a user
| and how much would a developer see of that?
|
| > I don't know what kind of services you mean.
|
| You write on your website: "Why this is better than the
| alternatives"
|
| If you could give examples of the alternatives that you
| think don't work then it might be helpful to see how your
| service differs from those.
| robalni wrote:
| > I'm very confused about how the distributed payment
| system would work. How much would a subscription cost for
| a user and how much would a developer see of that?
|
| Developers could sell subscriptions for any price they
| want. They have a limited number of subscriptions they
| can sell so there is a supply/demand that influences the
| price. Users buy directly from the developers so they
| would get 100% of the money (minus possible transaction
| fees depending on payment method).
|
| > If you could give examples of the alternatives that you
| think don't work then it might be helpful to see how your
| service differs from those.
|
| The alternatives are mainly the ones listed on the page
| above: buying things from developers in the usual way and
| donating. There are also other systems that work in a
| more centralized way where you pay the system that then
| distributes the money to the creators and this system
| differs from all of those in that it doesn't handle any
| money.
|
| If you want an example, there is liberapay.com that seems
| to be donations with centralized payments. My system
| tries to be better than that because:
|
| - Payments are less voluntary because you get access to
| stuff when you pay.
|
| - Payments are decentralized so there can be more freedom
| of choice in how you pay.
| Kinrany wrote:
| > Why not put yourself in the middle and offer a subscription
| to "1Sub.dev" and give users the same benefits?
|
| That's simple, decentralized networks are better than
| platforms and this thing has no need for centralization
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Pirating and 'illegal' copies of software is not what's impacting
| your bottom line.
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