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

A world where people pay for software

1sub.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 543 posts

Re: A world where people pay for software

#441

Post by TaylorAlexander »

TylerE wrote: post #433
ben0x539 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 200% convinced there are plenty of people out there who could easily be nerdsniped into building an open source dishwasher! Hackers get up to all kinds of stuff that doesn't seem traditionally fun!

Doing something as a hobby as very different from doing what someone tells you to do, how and when they tell you to do it.

This is true but what does this have to do with this idea? Who says we need bosses and overseers to get stuff done? See: https://vorondesign.com/

"The original goal of the VORON project, back in 2015, was to create a no-compromise 3D printer that was fun to assemble and a joy to use. It had to be quiet, clean, pretty, and continue to operate 24 hours a day without requiring constant fiddling. In short a true home micro-manufacturing machine without a hefty price tag. It took over a year in development, with every part being redesigned, stress tested and optimized. Shortly after the release a vibrant community formed around the project and continues to grow today. This community is part of what makes VORON such a special experience.

What was once a one-person operation has grown into a small tight-knit group of engineers united under a common design ethos. We're dedicated to creating production-quality printers you can assemble in your kitchen. It's this passion and dedication that drive us to push the boundaries just a little further. We build space shuttles with gardening tools so anyone can have a space shuttle of their own. Welcome to VORON Design"

Re: A world where people pay for software

#442

Post by xormapmap »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #422
999900000999 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does QAing Dishwasher firmware sound fun to you ? Even if you imagine software development to be generally fun, even the mundane, the rest of the workflow can be God awful boring. While Communism is a cool idea , it never works since you need incentives to motivate people.

Funny you say that because the most popular 3D printer firmwares are open source. Does QA’ing 3D printer firmware sound fun to you? No? Great well you don’t have to do that someone else is literally doing that right now because they thought it was fun. By the way this is a decent job for an apprentice under supervision. It’s a good way to learn with minimal risk and young people are often willing to do this kind of t…

Nobody is QAing 3D printer firmware because they thought it would be fun. They are doing it because their printer crashed and now they can no longer print.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#443

Post by TaylorAlexander »

ilyt wrote: post #377
smolder wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, ask someone to shovel shit for 8h/day 5 days a week and see where your thanks will get you. You might find one sucker, but not nearly enough

We only have structures like this due to the class system, where some people never shovel shit and some people do it all week long. A great suggestion for this incidentally brought up by Noam Chomsky in 1976 is to rotate people through these jobs, so everyone spends maybe two days a month on the task. People appreciate a little bit of difficult labor, it just sucks when you have to do it every day for survival. I linked directly to the few minutes of this talk where he talks about it here, but if you have more time check out the whole thing: https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI?t=1744

Re: A world where people pay for software

#444

Post by TaylorAlexander »

carlosjobim wrote: post #420
smolder wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The USSR honored their hardest and most productive workers with huge billboards and monuments to their eternal glory and legacy. Could you name one?

Yuri Gagarin Also I was born in 1984 in the USA so I don't have a lot of experience with billboards in Soviet Russia...

Re: A world where people pay for software

#445

Post by SequoiaHope »

Barrin92 wrote: post #436
bee_rider wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this is an argument to remove markets. It looks to me more like a suggestion to give people a some kind of guaranteed minimum income, and abolish all IP laws.

to remove property laws is to remove markets by definition. You cannot sell anything you have no ownership over or rights to, given that everyone can just take it. Hence why open source maintainers are barely paid, and companies in the space rely on selling services, not software. If you want, as the title of the article suggests, a world where people pay for software, strengthen IP laws instead of weakening them.

Even libertarians argue that intellectual property is not real property and is incompatible with capitalism. Removing government-mandated IP restrictions is not "removing property laws", it is freeing innovators to copy what they hold in their hands without government intervention. They own the property they purchase or produce but they don't own the intangible ideas behind the thing.

Mises Institute "How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism | Stephan Kinsella"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWShFz4d2RY

Re: A world where people pay for software

#446

Post by bee_rider »

Barrin92 wrote: post #436
bee_rider wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this is an argument to remove markets. It looks to me more like a suggestion to give people a some kind of guaranteed minimum income, and abolish all IP laws.

to remove property laws is to remove markets by definition. You cannot sell anything you have no ownership over or rights to, given that everyone can just take it. Hence why open source maintainers are barely paid, and companies in the space rely on selling services, not software. If you want, as the title of the article suggests, a world where people pay for software, strengthen IP laws instead of weakening them.

I’m talking about intellectual property, the legal fiction invented to let people own ideas. I’m not sure why you’d bring up actual property rights.

I don’t see any suggestions to remove property rights. This was the bit of confusion I was pointing out.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#447

Post by raincole »

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…

Quite a lot big open source projects are backed by big cooperations.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#448

Post by raincole »

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…

You need a whole ecosystem to make it work. Otherwise you get a cloud service that only 3 apps support.

I can't even imagine how to make it profitable, considering this market (seems to) be much smaller than App Store.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#449

Post by Delk »

typon wrote: post #428
999900000999 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does QAing Dishwasher firmware sound fun to you ? Even if you imagine software development to be generally fun, even the mundane, the rest of the workflow can be God awful boring. While Communism is a cool idea , it never works since you need incentives to motivate people.

Working on a Word Processor, especially one that is mature and stable, sounds like the most boring, awful thing I could work on. However, here are the list of release notes for LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/release-notes/ You can see man bugs were fixed in the latest release. What may sound dreadful to you might be interesting for someone else. While capitalism sounds nice in practice, it results…

The majority of those bug fixes are from people who probably were paid by companies to work on them.

A couple of people with a bunch of fixes attributed to them seem to work for Red Hat, and several contributors have Collabora email addresses. A fair bunch of fixes would seem to be from members of a LibreOffice team at some company (based on bugzilla comments and email addresses). One contributor seems to be from a company that does consulting related to LibreOffice.

A few fixes are from people registered with what look like private email addresses or with email addresses associated with the LibreOffice or other open source projects themselves. But they seem to be a minority.

That doesn't mean it can't be interesting to those people, or to many people, but it also doesn't mean most of the fixes were motivated by that alone.

(Also, fixing bugs is different than QA.)

> While capitalism sounds nice in practice, it results in the destruction of the planet because the profit motive eats everything alive and leaves nothing behind for future generations.

As always, that doesn't mean communism (or some other supposed polar opposite) would work. Or that those are the two possible binary options.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#450

Post by chromoblob »

thfuran wrote: post #399
chromoblob wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this requirement was known to me before I bought, sure. I think that this is a bad analogy to hardware, though. Polished steel roads are unreasonable to ask for, but bugless processors are reasonable to ask for.

No, they aren't. You can only buy the buggy processors that exist, not notional bugless ones.

As if processors were only sold by alien gods, and processors without bugs were impossible to create.
Post reply on HN