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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#341

Post by blowski »

ajkjk wrote: post #320

My question is: why isn't there yet a thing (or is there?) that works like AWS, but has the UX experience of a smartphone: you can install "apps" on it -- which you pay for hosting / bandwidth -- and it handles integration with all your devices, while leaving you in charge of how they're configured and what happens with the data? Sorta like expanding the mobile phone experience to encompass your whole internet experi…

Successful apps have more to lose from being on such an ecosystem than they stand to gain. It’s why so much software starts out as wanting to be open, dominates the market, then puts up the garden walls.

The closest we have to this is app stores - and look how everyone moans about them.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#342

Post by thorncorona »

smolder wrote: post #340
pfannkuchen wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem is that most necessary projects aren’t fun, and most fun projects aren’t necessary. Does anyone design dishwashers as a hobby, as an easy example? How do you propose we motivate people to do work that isn’t fun? Currently the carrot of higher pay or ownership in a more valuable thing is doing that, so we would need something to replace it if that goes away.

There are potentially other carrots aside from material wealth that can motivate people to do unpleasant work. Currently it takes significant pay to get people to do certain important but thankless jobs. We could thank them. A legacy is important to many people. They may enjoy an immutable commemoration of their work, if they're secure in a material sense.

This is the exact same answer every leftist I've talked to says when I ask them who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewers.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#343

Post by derefr »

goplayoutside wrote: post #337
ajkjk wrote: post #320

My question is: why isn't there yet a thing (or is there?) that works like AWS, but has the UX experience of a smartphone: you can install "apps" on it -- which you pay for hosting / bandwidth -- and it handles integration with all your devices, while leaving you in charge of how they're configured and what happens with the data? Sorta like expanding the mobile phone experience to encompass your whole internet experi…

Do you mean something like Cloudron or PikaPods or SandStorm? "Self-hosting as a Service". Kagi solves the conflict of interest aspect of search engines like Google. (No affiliation, just a satisfied early adopter.)

Kind of, but it should be vertically integrated between "cloud" and "edge" and "home-network" and "mobile." With all of that being either resources you own, or resources you're personally billed for, directly by the providers (though aggregated per app), with no ability for the app to extract rents on the costs of those resources (i.e. you're not paying the app so that the app in turn pays for the resources; you're being billed by the "cloud" and "edge" providers directly.)

If you install e.g. a Photos app, then that'd be a viewer app + cache on your phone; a bounded-size cache on your NAS or ISP gateway-router; a thumbnailing and face-detection background worker started in your ISP's edge DC; and a primary store in some cloud.

If you install e.g. Minecraft, then the server for that game will dynamically reposition itself (and migrate its data) between running embedded on device, vs. on appliance-compute on your home network, vs. on your ISP's edge-compute, vs. on the cloud — depending on whether you're playing single-player, vs. multiplayer with someone else on the same network, vs. at least one player being elsewhere in your region, vs. people connecting all over the world. (And, of course, when nobody is connected to it, the server should quiesce to just being dead state and then gradually have that state "evict upward" toward the cloud.)

IMHO a major part of this would be getting ISPs to sell commodity edge-compute power to OS vendors, both in-DC and in-home-network (presumably by putting addressable application processing capability into ISP gateway routers.)

Re: A world where people pay for software

#345

Post by crazygringo »

stronglikedan wrote: post #263
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…

I avoid saas precisely because of the subscription model. Occasionally, I need to make a flowchart, but I don't need to make flowcharts every month. I used to be able to pay for a flowchart software once, and then use it occasionally. Now it seems that, to get quality flowchart software, I have to pay monthly for something I don't use monthly. So instead, I find some free flowchart software which may or may not be li…

Funny, your scenario to me seems like SAAS is an improvement.

If I only use flowchart software 2x/yr, I can just pay those two individual months and nothing else. Six times over three years is way cheaper than buying it outright ever would have been. Plus after three years I'd be needing something that the newer version introduced anyways.

So in your scenario SAAS saves a bunch of money and keeps your features and OS compatibility up to date.

You just have to remember to cancel it once you're done each month, but that's easy enough with a calendar reminder.

This way you get to save a lot of money over buying it outright.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#346

Post by theragra »

derefr wrote: post #339
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #306

Computers have an unprecedented ability to reproduce value for free. Programmers need a relatively fixed amount of resources to thrive. (The value of resources varies by location but we all need things like food, shelter, transportation, clothing, tools, etc etc) If we can find a way to make sure every person has what they need to thrive regardless of their income, programmers can open source all of their software an…

Do you think there would be very many programmers in such a world? Personally, I think that a lot of people who right now go into programming "because it's a good career", would instead do things that are equally creative but also capture other things high on the Maslow hierarchy — e.g. fame. Personally, despite enthusiastically enjoying my programming career and puzzle-oriented problem-solving more generally, I'm st…

Same amount as novelists ;) I enjoy both, in moderation

Re: A world where people pay for software

#347

Post by watermelon0 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #185
vbezhenar wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm buying a lifetime thing, it's an investition. I spent money and got thing that will never get old. As time goes on, I'm getting more things and I need to spend less. If I'm buying a subscription, it's an obligation. I'll have to spend money from now until I die or I'll get reduced QoL. Even if today I have spare $200/month, that might not be the case tomorrow. Maybe I'll get fired. Maybe government turn my cas…

Lifetime thing is a rather large statement, especially with software though isn't it? Most of the pre-subscription model compares were never lifetime purchases. Software that needed paid purchase update every 3-5 years to get OS support / features. No software I used in 1995 will run on my current computers. Even 2005 or 2010 is dubious in some cases. Content constantly changed delivery mechanisms and people had to b…

> No software I used in 1995 will run on my current computers.

I'd be surprised if many SaaS products from today will still be available in 28 years time.

I'd assume that many 32bit programs from Win95 era still work natively on Windows 11, and for the rest (including 16bit and DOS programs) you can use compatibility layers (e.g. Wine) and emulators.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#348

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

stronglikedan wrote: post #263
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…

I avoid saas precisely because of the subscription model. Occasionally, I need to make a flowchart, but I don't need to make flowcharts every month. I used to be able to pay for a flowchart software once, and then use it occasionally. Now it seems that, to get quality flowchart software, I have to pay monthly for something I don't use monthly. So instead, I find some free flowchart software which may or may not be li…

Yes. I have some audio waveform generation software I use only once in a long while. I paid about $50 for it almost 5 years ago. If it were SaaS, I'd have paid a lot more than that over the last 5 years.

A long time ago I worked out an agreement with a local gym. To avoid a membership that I would only need for a few months (I was living in a hotel temporarily with no access to my own equipment), I paid $10 each time I showed up. This could be a useful model for rarely-used software.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#349

Post by pzo »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #333
ajkjk wrote: post #320

My question is: why isn't there yet a thing (or is there?) that works like AWS, but has the UX experience of a smartphone: you can install "apps" on it -- which you pay for hosting / bandwidth -- and it handles integration with all your devices, while leaving you in charge of how they're configured and what happens with the data? Sorta like expanding the mobile phone experience to encompass your whole internet experi…

I want a plug-and-play way to install services like (front-ends) BreezeWiki, Rimgo, Nitter, and Invidious, and (self-hosted) Miniflux, Gitea, a centralized Syncthing node, and an image sync tool (possibly Immich), onto an old laptop I own, without messing with users, groups, AUR builds, upgrading between Postgres versions... like a world where sandstorm.io had taken off. Then access them on any of my devices, like Ta…

Haven't tried this project yet but my plan is to buy cheap hp elitedesk / dell optiplex thin client and just install umbrelOS [0] that has app store with many of those apps such as: homebridge, home assistant, pihole, trailscale, gitea, syncthing, vaultwarden, nextcloud etc.

[0] https://umbrel.com/

Re: A world where people pay for software

#350

Post by robalni »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #335
robalni wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm a developer and get to chose what to charge, that means I can ask people for $0.01, and they would get access to everything from all developers of this "platform"? You can do that but you will not make a lot of money that way. The number of subscriptions you can sell is limited so if you sell all of them for $0.01 you will probably wish you had asked for more and when you have sold out, only the more expensi…

> How fast they will get more could depend on the current value of their account, where the value could be calculated from the credits and the number of subscribers they have. So are you then implicitly setting the price yourself because anyone who doesn't charge enough can't get more credits? Suppose someone develops an app which takes hardly any effort to make -- it's a hundred lines of code -- but it does somethin…

> So are you then implicitly setting the price yourself because anyone who doesn't charge enough can't get more credits?

Everyone can get more credits. The idea is that when we think we need more subscriptions to sell, every developer would get a number of additional credits that is proportional to the number of credits they have (with active subscriptions converted to credits for the calculation).

> But to do that you'd have to let them sell a hundred million subscriptions for $0.01 each.

That would be very difficult for them to do since the number of subscirptions they can sell is limited by how many credits they have.

> Some app which is specialized and requires a million dollars of developer time but only has a market of 10,000 customers.

If you make software for only a few people and you need a lot of money then I don't think this system is for you. It is mostly for developers who make software for everybody.

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