Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On paying for software

seths.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 279 posts

Re: On paying for software

#201

Post by progval »

user5994461 wrote: post #200
jancsika wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You miss the possibility of simply offering to pay a developer with the relevant expertise to fix one of these bugs for you. I can tell you from experience that there are FLOSS developers out there with sufficient expertise and professionalism to do this.

Expect 500 euros per day for a cheap developer in Eastern Europe. Maybe similar for Indian outsourcing or Latin American. Expect over a 1000 dollars per day for a qualified developer in a first world location. Point being. No individual can pay that much and the develop should rather get a day job unless the software has high earning potential.

> No individual can pay that much and the develop should rather get a day job

You could create a cooperative of users that hires one or two developers to work for all of them.

Re: On paying for software

#202

Post by progval »

jcoffland wrote: post #154
justinclift wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we please dispense with this notion and start realizing one simple fact: people will typically only pay for something if you make them pay. Things to appear to be changing for the better though. As an examply, Gina Häußge is working full time on OctoPrint (3D printing software) supported entirely by donations: https://www.patreon.com/foosel There are probably others too, I'm just not aware of them and have only…

Gina Häußge is the only one making reasonable money on Patron for a software project, last I checked. I exchanged several emails with her about this very topic. Despite her success in fund raising, even she was concerned about the long-term viability of this sort of funding. I also am the author of an active Open-Source project. I accept donations but they have never amounted to much.

Mastodon's main dev too: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

Re: On paying for software

#203

Post by jeffreyrogers »

Animats wrote: post #195

To name a few, I’m glad to use and pay for: Overcast, Feedblitz, Discourse, Zapier, Dropbox, Roon, WavePad, Bench, Nisus, Zoom, Slack, SuperDuper, Mailchimp, Hover, TypeExpander, Tidal. Those are services, not standalone software. (Tidal may be standalone, but it's from 1979.) It's not like people are still buying Walter Bright's C++ compiler.

At least 3 of those are desktop software.

Re: On paying for software

#204

Post by TaylorAlexander »

Rjevski wrote: post #172
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but this sounds like an opportunity for something like “Uber for FLOSS support.” Or perhaps it would be more like OkCupid. But you could pay money and your FLOSS problems get researched and solved for you by a developer who is experienced in this area. In practice I can see this as a forum where people make minimal effort posts and skilled people give them quality support. Just as I was forming the previous sent…

The issue is that even if he managed to find a good developer to pay to improve some FLOSS software, it would come out very expensive in the end, first because the UI frameworks & libraries you get in the Linux world are nowhere near what you get on macOS, so the developer will require more time, and also because you won’t be selling that software later on to make any kind of money back since it’s FLOSS, and even whe…

Yes but keep in mind people who work on FLOSS are interested in it for more than money, so the person being paid may be willing to work for a little less (or invest more time) knowing that the work that they do is helping FLOSS. So both people can share the cost burden here. We are talking about two people passionate about FLOSS that one is using it despite the problems (and willing to pay) and one has taken it upon themselves to learn how to fix it.

Re: On paying for software

#205

Post by kabdib »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #171
kabdib wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to consider survivor bias. We don't have data for the number of "artists of the past" who were stopped because they couldn't find patrons. How many Da Vincis and Mozarts had to work in fields or row galleys rather than work as artists? It is really, really difficult to build a career around patronage. A few people can do it. Most cannot. The fundamental flaw of the "software should be free because duplicatio…

You make some good points. Concerning whether works should or should not be free, I'm not sure. I think people should get paid somehow . How to solve that problem is not clear to me. What I've been observing, though, is people acting as if the software is free because copying is practically free. This happens all the time and nobody even thinks about it. Friends share programs, music, movies, pictures, documents and…

You're never going to stamp out casual copying. We know that doesn't work. Even in a healthy market there will always be some. Rampant copyright infringement is a sign of an inefficient market; supply is limited (e.g., geo-locked) or the price is too high. But there's always going to be some person who rationalizes liberating a $2 game because "you can't steal bits". We've been over the arguments. I've written copy-protection code, I've gone out for beers with self-professed software pirates. None of this is going away.

In your patched-up analogy, someone has to pay for that first billion dollar gallon of gasoline. Someone did pay for the exploration, drilling, extraction, transportation, refining and marketing of the fuel; they paid for equipment, for people's salaries, for mineral rights, for the overhead of keeping a company running. It's a lot of money; it's an investment, and the investors expect a return. Take away the return and you'll find that none of the exploration, drilling, refining, etc. are going to happen. Have fun starving in the dark.

Software is no different, except that the "transportation" costs are close to zero. None of the other costs are zero, but the cheapness of that COPY command is all people really think about. They don't want to think about the engineers, the animators, voice actors, IT staff, management and rooms full of equipment necessary to create the product. They don't want to know about buying servers, spending money on marketing programs, creating sales pipelines, paying taxes and permits and making sure companies can hire and retain the folks necessary to make more product. I guess it's inconvenient to the rationalization.

Re: On paying for software

#206

Post by progval »

ropeadopepope wrote: post #71
wazoox wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with open source is, for some reason, the developers feel no sense of obligation to the end users or the people who donate to them. MacOS devs do and will go out of their way to make sure their software is not just usable, but a sheer pleasure to use in every way possible. Yes, there are exceptions (I'm looking at you, Apple, with your Xcode and your Finder) but for the most part that's just the way thing…

> The problem with open source is, for some reason, the developers feel no sense of obligation to the end users or the people who donate to them.

I always go out of my way to help users who showed gratitude to me, either with a donation (those are very rare) or by being extra nice to me last time I helped them.

But obviously, users who insult my software and myself every time they have an issue come last on my list of priorities.

Re: On paying for software

#207

Post by vslira »

Is there any license that makes software free (as in beer) for contributors/maintainers and paid for everyone else? This way it would be possible to alleviate the free riding problem while providing a mechanism to use software free of charge. Maybe this could work with networks of projects, so contributing to numpy would let you use scipy for free. Add exceptions to personal/non commercial use if necessary. Something like that

Re: On paying for software

#208

Post by progval »

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,…

> We have been unable to find a license that accurately fits Dependabot's needs (suggestions are welcome)

How about dual-licensing as CC-BY-ND (using the bot as-is, even for profit) and CC-BY-NC (making modifications, but not for profit)?

Re: On paying for software

#209

Post by justinclift »

jcoffland wrote: post #154
justinclift wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we please dispense with this notion and start realizing one simple fact: people will typically only pay for something if you make them pay. Things to appear to be changing for the better though. As an examply, Gina Häußge is working full time on OctoPrint (3D printing software) supported entirely by donations: https://www.patreon.com/foosel There are probably others too, I'm just not aware of them and have only…

Gina Häußge is the only one making reasonable money on Patron for a software project, last I checked. I exchanged several emails with her about this very topic. Despite her success in fund raising, even she was concerned about the long-term viability of this sort of funding. I also am the author of an active Open-Source project. I accept donations but they have never amounted to much.

Just noticed you're the primary author of CAMotics.

I'd heard of it before, but haven't yet tried it out. I'll try to get time to do so, as I've recently started helping out a different CNC project (github.com/synthetos/g2).

They kind of look like they might complement each other. Not 100% sure yet though. ;)

Re: On paying for software

#210

Post by pjmlp »

wazoox wrote: post #170
pjmlp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to pay for a mortgage with donations.

99% of paid apps developers can't make end meet anyway. Another false dichotomy. Creating an app and sticking a price on it isn't a business model any more than creating an app and asking for donations. Both are almost certain failure. But people constantly hear about this guy or that company that made some huge success and became rich; nobody talks about the millions who failed and whose apps were simply forgotten.…

> Oh, and BTW, the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace and many other NGOs live, AFAIK, mostly on donations.

They do, but they also get sponsoring from many governments across the globe, do continuous street actions trying to get people to donate for them´, and after a certain age most people end up leaving to some positions with more stability.

Post reply on HN