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On paying for software

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Re: On paying for software

#51

Post by tomjen3 »

greysteil wrote: post #30
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/

Great blog post - thanks for writing it. I've had the same experience with people asking for an MIT license on dependabot-core (the public repo that holds the core logic for my SaaS business, but which has no license and a comment saying those who wish to use it for commercial gain should contact me instead). I already give the product away for free to open source projects and anyone using it in a personal capacity,…

As a general point, please put a license on your contributions if you put them on github. Don't much care what it is, and I don't mind paying, but don't make me do a song and dance to see what your price is.

Especially if you are already giving it away to open source projects -- my bet is most people who see "call me" as a clause will move on, even people you are actually trilled to help.

AGPLv3 would be a decent suggestion, but even your own license wouldn't be bad either.

Re: On paying for software

#52

Post by cableshaft »

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.

I agree with this. That's why I avoid most web and SAAS platforms for things nowadays. I make an exception for things where I can get my data off their platform in a format I want pretty easily (i.e. I will use Google Docs because I can easily download the files as DOCX or PDF files) or the data I'm storing with them is mainly settings or preferences (I.e. Youtube knowing I'm subscribed to X publishers).

I've been burned a few times and lost data just because a company goes out of business, or I decided I wanted to use a different platform and all my data from before was locked in to this other proprietary system.

So yeah, if you're coming up with this hot new productivity/task software and I can't either download the data in an open format or at least use the software on the desktop, 100% offline? No thanks.

And in general I hate subscriptions unless I'm getting access to libraries of content, i.e. Spotify, Netflix, or it's just for updates. By that I mean I get the software and a year's worth of updates when I paid for the license, and it's mine, you can't take access away from me, I have it for as long as I want, and I only pay again when I decide I use the software enough and the updates are compelling enough that I really want to update.

Which is another reason why SAAS and Web apps don't really work for me, because they almost invariably charge a monthly fee and there's nothing to download so I just lose access the moment I stop paying. There are exceptions, but those are rare (mainly web hosting and cloud storage).

It's for this reason why I refuse to pay for Adobe Suite, because you only have access for as long as you pay the monthly subscription. Screw that, my copy of Adobe Illustrator pre-subscription still gets the job done fine thanks. I might have upgraded by now if they hadn't switched to a subscription model, but now I'm going to keep using that as long as humanly possible, then search for an alternative.

Re: On paying for software

#53

Post by IncRnd »

merb wrote: post #28
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/

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 don't need everything.

Re: On paying for software

#54

Post by IncRnd »

paulcole wrote: post #38

> I like being the customer (as opposed to a social network, where I’m the product). Interesting concept. Can anyone expound on what he means by this?

In a "free service" the service company often makes money by selling ad space to third parties for displaying to users or by selling user information to third parties. In each of these models, the user of the service, who isn't paying money, is actually the product not the customer. Yet, many users believe that these free services are being run for their benefit free-of-charge, which is clearly a bad assumption to make.

Re: On paying for software

#55

Post by Torwald »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #48
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…

>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…

> Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to perform and it costs nothing.

That is not true. Running, maintaining, etc the IT infrastructure is costing money, electricity etc. It doesn't come for free.

Re: On paying for software

#56

Post by hammerha »

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/

I've just tried fman and I love it.

I've never heard about this tool before. I'm pretty sure that you would be able to sell more if you market it a bit more. Thanks for the software!

Re: On paying for software

#57

Post by paulcole »

deepakkarki wrote: post #47
paulcole wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

duh, I am an idiot. Too early.

Re: On paying for software

#58

Post by mherrmann »

hammerha wrote: post #56
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/

I've just tried fman and I love it. I've never heard about this tool before. I'm pretty sure that you would be able to sell more if you market it a bit more. Thanks for the software!

That's great to hear. Thanks!

Re: On paying for software

#59

Post by TimJYoung »

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…

No other business endeavor on the planet operates on "production time" when pricing products. Products are priced according to their value. Given a reasonably competitive market, that value will be accurate and fair for customers, and the customers will be able to find a similar product that does most or all of what they want at the price point that they can afford.

Re: On paying for software

#60

Post by wazoox »

afarrell wrote: post #49

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…

I use Linux and most free software projects allow donations. I even donated to projects I don't actually use, like FreeBSD. I donated money to many free software projects, Ardour, Mozilla, LibreOffice, OpenBSD, etc. This is clearly a false dichotomy.
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