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Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this work?
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.
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 blow…
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.
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…
> 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.
This is my project, so if you have questions, I can answer them in this thread.
> 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…
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.
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
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
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 bu…
This is my project, so if you have questions, I can answer them in this thread.
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?
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.
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
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 blow…
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.
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.