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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#131

Post by dboreham »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #54
inglor_cz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#132

Post by cscheid »

gizmo wrote: post #21

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…

> 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.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#133

Post by zer8k »

chadash wrote: post #28

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…

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.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#134

Post by robalni »

abmackenzie wrote: post #53
robalni wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

> 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.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#135

Post by grishka »

jwells89 wrote: post #123
grishka wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

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.)

Re: A world where people pay for software

#136

Post by jwells89 »

jehb wrote: post #81
chadash wrote: post #28

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 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 eve…

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.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#137

Post by ativzzz »

Knee_Pain wrote: post #39

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…

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

Re: A world where people pay for software

#138

Post by ipaddr »

buggy6257 wrote: post #91
7e wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soft…

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 Yo…

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

Re: A world where people pay for software

#139

Post by CBarkleyU »

robalni wrote: post #52
andy99 wrote: post #32

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…

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.

>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?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#140

Post by TheMode »

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.

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