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A world where people pay for software

1sub.dev

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#141

Post by chromoblob »

cscheid wrote: post #132
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 qua…

As N of people → ∞, chances for software to break → finite maximum. And for good enough software you should consider that maximum already regardless of the number of users.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#142

Post by nemo »

grishka wrote: post #101
steveBK123 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely incorrect. Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change. Dependencies break. Security updates. Etc. Engineering projects usually hand off maintenance to their owner. Your house/car need maintenance. Your cities roads/bridges/tunnels need maintenance. The difference with software is that maintenance is done by the producers as they own the code.

> Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change. OSes also can be "excellent products". They don't need yearly updates, there's nothing inherent to them that would prevent them from being made perfect, finished and never updated again. The only case when an otherwise perfect OS would truly need to update is when new hardware capabilities require OS-level changes to support. Sometimes it may be beneficial to expose…

This all sounds fine hypothetically, you might want to take a look around at the world for a while to see why it doesn't fit your model. Obviously your idea hasn't happened, and there's good reasons why this is the case that you could readily discover if you took a look at reality instead of your model of reality.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#143

Post by zer8k »

intelVISA wrote: post #108
civilized wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand. Office 2003 (or earlier) and similar products aren't constantly phoning home for updates like more recent software. Millions of people have had a single 100% static binary for these programs running on their computer for many years. The ability to phone home, if it exists at all, may even be broken or disabled. This is in fact how all software worked until, I don't know, about two decade…

Single static binary software, the blessed future we never saw.

As beautiful as it is, and for the all the problems dynamic linking causes, the edges on single static binary software are very, very sharp.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#144

Post by robalni »

Kinrany wrote: post #80
robalni wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would developers use this over just asking for money? 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 subs…

> limited number of subscriptions to sell Oh, I don't remember the website mentioning this. How does this work, and what are the implications?

> Oh, I don't remember the website mentioning this. How does this work, and what are the implications?

You can read about it here (bottom): https://1sub.dev/about/how-it-works

It means that there is a supply/demand that influences what price the subscriptions can be sold for. Developers have a limited number of "credits" that can be turned into subscriptions. They can get more credits by making people subscribe through their links. There is also a plan that the credits will be multiplied and grow with time in order to keep the prices on a sane level.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#145

Post by vbezhenar »

ativzzz wrote: post #129
ozim wrote: post #90

I have a different take on the topic. People should not pay for software - average Joe should have all kinds of software basically free. Now you ask "who should pay for development", corporations, companies or foundations where people still could donate but would not have to. Where corporations and companies pay salaries and provide end users with services. Solo devs should not write and maintain anything without get…

This is like the musician problem. There are so many people willing to play for pretty much nothing or for free that it's very hard for the average musician to make money. On the consumer side, why should you always pay for music when so many people are doing it for free? There's an oversupply of eager musicians making music Same with OSS development. Why should you pay for something if people just do it for free? Do…

> But they do, and they will regardless. And until they stop, nothing will change. There's an oversupply of eager coders coding for free

There's no thriving market of OSS apps for iOS.

So the solution is simple. Charge some money from developer to allow distribution of his apps. This seem to kill open source attitude very well.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#146

Post by Mc91 »

7e wrote: post #69
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…

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…

> If you can't monetize you can't put people on your software and it will suck (like most OSS software, for example).

I have worked on FLOSS software and I have worked on non-FLOSS software and I don't see most FLOSS software sucking in a way that non-FLOSS does not.

FLOSS has some advantages - as there is no compelling need to release new features which can drive up revenue and profit (or at least OKRs) for the next quarter, you don't get a constant need to release unneeded junk to try to squeeze the last dime out of consumers. You can actually spend time refactoring the code, or only releasing when it is properly architected.

Most of the servers and smartphones in the world are running on a FLOSS kernel. MacBook's OS derive from CSRG's BSD, and even some of Windows, like the Internet stack, derive from FLOSS. If it sucks so much, why do virtually all major operating systems derive fully, or at least partially, from it?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#147

Post by jwells89 »

grishka wrote: post #135
jwells89 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" s…

> 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.

Google is a bit of a special case I think due to their culture of using big projects as a means of climbing the corporate ladder. The only thing that could ever possibly result from that is endless churn.

> Sure. But at some point it will reach the "secure enough" state, won't it?

Maybe, I’m too much of a layman in the field of infosec to be able to say.

> (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)

True, but it’s still problematic if e.g. the user accidentally denies access unknowingly, which will result in the app producing seemingly nonsensical errors. For a good user experience the app needs to be able to tell the user what the real problem is.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#148

Post by zer8k »

r00fus wrote: post #72
nightski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel it's the opposite. The incentive is to lock you in and provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible. Get you hooked, take your data hostage, and then jack up the price as much as possible while delivering little to no additional functionality. Bugs? who cares. Broken functionality? No big deal. You are locked in baby!

Where have you experienced data lockin? That sounds like poor SaaS strategies from the 2000s.

Fusion 360 is one example off the top of my head.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#149

Post by chromoblob »

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…

The program's interface with environment won't change forever, when you write your program as a pure function which only touches exactly the thing it fundamentally needs to, you use a pretty much finalized interface.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#150

Post by nebulous1 »

robalni wrote: post #2

This is my project, so if you have questions, I can answer them in this thread.

I feel like the overall system should be clearer. For instance it's not clear how the developers get credits or whether developer accounts are somehow authenticated as representing a genuine entity.

In the opening statement of the site the idea of merely trusting the user without copy protection is completely ignored, but without more details it's not clear if the proposed system is any better.

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