On paying for software • Hacker News Board

Re: On paying for software

#41

Post by youdontknowtho » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 1:57 PM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #31

pjmlp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that was part of an effort to do this in the early .com days, it is a lost hope trying to sell open source software to consumers. While selling to enterprise can be made via consulting and training, most consumers just want a one time shot paying for their software. Well, if you do that with commercial software, usually the only way to avoid paying is piracy. In open source world, they can just go to anoth…

I don't think the primary problem is cost, but that when you build your product tightly coupled with a propretary product that is hard to migrate off of then the vendor of that product can shake you down, or they can go bankrupt or what have you. It makes your business vulnerable, and no one wants that. Also your production environment crashing because a license expired. Fun times.

You really aren't replying to the person who actually tried to make money in open source and related some actual experience of why it didn't work.

Businesses actually don't give two sh*ts about being "tightly coupled" with a proprietary product. That's a sysadmin thing. It makes sense to the "us" of the world, but businesses don't care.

Look at any area or field where billions or trillions of dollars worth of transactions still go through systems running on IBM iSeries, or mainframes. It's just the cost of doing business.

Re: On paying for software

#42

Post by Pxtl » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 1:57 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #34

mherrmann wrote: post #9

As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

Paying for software may be moral , but it certainly isn't natural . As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update…

> but it certainly isn't natural

Neither are money or laws, in that sense.

Re: On paying for software

#43

Post by renox » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 1:57 PM UTC

kaibee wrote: post #40

matheusmoreira wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for software may be moral , but it certainly isn't natural . As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update…

> but it certainly isn't natural. So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here. > It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. It's a social construct that we've adopted in society because it allows for things we like. > The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game…

> Nothing about software development is 'natural'

Why do you say so?

> I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here

I think that he's talking about the ease of copying software: it's quite hard to make people pay for something so easy to duplicate..

Re: On paying for software

#44

Post by cableshaft » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 1:59 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #34

mherrmann wrote: post #9

As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

Paying for software may be moral , but it certainly isn't natural . As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update…

> The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.

They have to find your game and know they want it first, and it might not be too obvious to other people why they might want your game until it is already far enough along that it might as well be released. And by then it might be too late, unless you've made a game that can be endlessly added to.

First impressions count for quite a bit, so if you make your game available before it's really ready, when there's only a small amount of content, etc, then people (who might have loved your completed game) might give it a try, decide 'This game is broken and there's no content' and then never bother giving it a second chance.

Not to mention that indie game developers (especially those that get funding ahead of time, like on Kickstarter) tend to overpromise and and underestimate how much time and money those promises will take. See: Mighty No. 9, No Man's Sky, Star Citizen. Even the mega-hit Shovel Knight burned through all the money it crowdfunded and the developers had to work for zero salary for four months before the game was released.

Finally, the moment you make your game available for others to play, you're instantly on the hook for technical support, which could take a large amount of time, especially if you're one of only a handful of developers, precious time that could be spent developing the game instead.

So long story short, if developers want to get paid as they are developing a game, they will have to spend an inconsequential amount of time marketing and supporting an unfinished, broken buggy game, which could easily take 60% or more of their time (a percentage I often see people claim is needed for the non-software side of their software business).

It's a business model that works in some instances, but it doesn't work for everyone.

Re: On paying for software

#45

Post by youdontknowtho » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #10

open-source-ux wrote: post #6

Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Are the available options stacked against them? Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients using open source software. But what if you don't want to be a consultant and simply want to charge a business for using your open source product? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can…

As someone that was part of an effort to do this in the early .com days, it is a lost hope trying to sell open source software to consumers. While selling to enterprise can be made via consulting and training, most consumers just want a one time shot paying for their software. Well, if you do that with commercial software, usually the only way to avoid paying is piracy. In open source world, they can just go to anoth…

Yeah, there's a contingent that won't ever be happy with a commercial arrangement.

Just thinking about the way that version control was done for Linux before Git. The author of the system was happy to have people using it as long as no one reverse engineered the product that he was actively selling to customers. The reaction from the community was, "thanks for contributing your hard work...now I'm going to make a clone."

There's a sense of entitlement that really turned me off of open source *nix for a long time. That's just me though. I'm over it, it won...OSS won...free beats everything in the end.

Re: On paying for software

#46

Post by afarrell » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

renox wrote: post #43

kaibee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it certainly isn't natural. So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here. > It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. It's a social construct that we've adopted in society because it allows for things we like. > The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game…

> Nothing about software development is 'natural' Why do you say so? > I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here I think that he's talking about the ease of copying software: it's quite hard to make people pay for something so easy to duplicate..

> > Nothing about software development is 'natural'

> Why do you say so?

Because building even the simplest computers requires large-scale industrial processes. All of this is based on a social/economic system that required the intelligent design of many many people and organizations.

Re: On paying for software

#47

Post by deepakkarki » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #39

merb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand how you feel and I also think your blog post is correct in many ways. However I think software should be reasonably priced which is most often not the case. And also people can't pay everybody 5-10 dollar/euro for everything, we would quickly need to pay thousands of dollars/euros yearly to access/use everything. That's why I think sometimes having another way of "paying", like through ads or maybe s…

Maybe you just need fewer $5-10 dollar/month things than you think? At that price you could have 100-200 of them before “quickly” needing to pay thousands of dollars yearly.

100-200 services would add up to $1000/mo not per year.

Re: On paying for software

#48

Post by matheusmoreira » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

kaibee wrote: post #40

matheusmoreira wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for software may be moral , but it certainly isn't natural . As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update…

> but it certainly isn't natural. So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here. > It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. It's a social construct that we've adopted in society because it allows for things we like. > The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game…

>I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.

Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to perform and it costs nothing. Therefore, data is naturally easy to copy.

Software doesn't need to be manufactured like physical goods do: the software construction step is fully automated by compilers and build systems. The cost of all this is approximately $0. Networks aren't free because of bandwidth costs, but they still make it really easy and cheap to copy data to a lot of computers.

Since games are software and software is data, it is rather easy to distribute them to an unbounded number of machines. Even if you come up with some complicated copy protection scheme, people only need to crack it once and produce a DRM-free version of the game that will work everywhere and won't do stupid things such as require an internet connection. Even cryptographically secure platforms such as the PS4 eventually got cracked and the first thing people did is enable the execution of unsigned software.

>insisting that reality should be the way that fits nicely with my arbitrary mental models

That's exactly what copyright does.

Re: On paying for software

#49

Post by afarrell » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

One of the reasons that I switched from Linx to OSX was so that I could pay for more of my software. Why? Because then I more of the software I used could be maintained by someone who had the time to dig into bugs and UI problems and to fix them. But in Linux, couldn't I just edit the source myself? Realistically, no. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to source-dive in a totally new project in a language I never use, especially without someone willing to give me a walkthrough of the architecture and fundamental models of the program. It is waaaay more efficient for these to be fixed by an engineer working not in their spare time, but as their full-time job.

A developer targeting OSX knows they have an audience of people willing to pay him money so he can spend his whole day doing usability tests and his evening watching a little league game.

I do miss strace though.

Re: On paying for software

#50

Post by antris » Sun, Jun 10, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC

kaibee wrote: post #40

matheusmoreira wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for software may be moral , but it certainly isn't natural . As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update…

> but it certainly isn't natural. So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here. > It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. It's a social construct that we've adopted in society because it allows for things we like. > The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game…

> So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.

I'm quite sure they're referring to artificial scarcity. Making copies is very easy, making games is very hard. Therefore it makes much more sense to charge for the development of the game rather than the copies. Making abundant resources artificially scarce is either frowned upon or flat-out illegal in pretty much every other industry.

> there are many games that would not exist without such a model

How do you know?