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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#451

Post by midoridensha »

ben0x539 wrote: post #358
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.

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!

If a group of nerds builds an open-source dishwasher as a hobby, the final product will be something too esoteric and difficult to use for regular people.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#452

Post by Barrin92 »

bee_rider wrote: post #446
Barrin92 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All property rights are legal fiction, there's no "actual property rights". Owning ideas is perfectly reasonable because that's where the entire value is, and having rights to your own ideas guarantees that you are compensated for the invention and value they provide to others. Property rights, intellectual and non-intellectual, correctly allocate resources to value creators.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#453

Post by smolder »

lend000 wrote: post #424
smolder wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it seems crazy on its face. And I'm sure those leftists you refer to didn't have a coherent concept of how such a system would actually work . There's no way we could just replace paychecks today with rations and social credits and have a functioning system. It'd be an extreme destabilizing change to a system we built incrementally over a long time to be self reinforcing. But I also have the view that people a…

You seem smart and it always amazes me how popular communist concepts are with smart people on HN. Didn't you have some assigned group projects in school? Perhaps some people are easily satisfied by carrying the burden of other people who they don't know and who don't appreciate them, but I'd wager a ridiculously high majority of value producers would not be. Humans are social animals, but we're individuals first and…

I think people misunderstood where I was coming from a bit. To be clear, I wasn't commenting in support of communism, or against rewarding merit, or against rewarding merit with money. Status in life and legacy in death are still motivators that matter, though, and with the right set of shared values, they are powerful.

We still generally have a culture in the US of respecting our veterans and service members, for example. There is some social value in serving that's not material. If there wasn't, the material benefits would need to be more substantial.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#454

Post by raincole »

a254613e wrote: post #9

Besides being sick of subscriptions for every small thing, I'm not sure I understand the premise here: "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." So users won't pay a one-time fee, but instead they will pay a subscription to get that one software they need? They won't "find the software somewhere else" if it's behind a sub…

It won't work.

It's nothing about what it actually does. If your business model:

1. Targets general people, rather than a very specific niche group 2. Requires users to carefully read a paragraph of text to understand the benefits

It just won't work. There is a reason that insurance salemans exist.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#455

Post by shon »

JohnFen wrote: post #252
shon wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software margins are good, especially compared to physical things. However, the marginal cost is far from zero. It scales with # and variety of users. Today, all software comes with complex dependencies. Take for example any mobile app. Apps require constant upgrades to keep up with the hardware and software changes on the platforms. You can’t just build an iPhone app and leave it alone to be enjoyed by people. I’ve…

> Software doesn’t just work anymore. The platform that executes it is constantly changing. It depends on the software. But where this is true, it's not because of some innate nature of software, it's because of business decisions software companies have made.

I disagree. Especially for business software.

Unlike hobby software, where you could reasonably write everything from scratch just for fun, or say in write it in 6502 ASM which hasn’t changed at all for 50 years and won’t change in 50 more, in modern business software, you use common frameworks, APIs, platforms. All of those mean the software you write will fail as those dependencies and platforms change and age out.

Business software has to be built on common building blocks because as a business you need to be able to hire people who can work on it. So things like Java and node and react and dozens of APIs exist which creates dependencies and requires ongoing maintenance as those components continue to change.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#456

Post by myk9001 »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #443
ilyt wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lin…

Without any intention of snark or confrontation whatsoever, can I ask you

1) Have you personally tried to put this idea to practice? If yes, for how long? Would you be willing to share some details? If no, why not? It doesn't take changing the entire society, you can do something like that literally now. Be creative, travel to a different random town twice a month and offer to clean toilets in a couple of buildings? Again, I don't mean to be snarky with this example, I just think working on 3D printers doesn't cut it as a type of difficult labor. Think more along the lines of going down into a mine, shoveling literal shit for 8 hours, etc.

2) Imagine, the society has actually changed such that everyone is supposed to do a couple days of difficult labor. What happens if someone refuses? A punishment? If there is no punishment, what happens if almost everyone refuses and there's not enough people to sustain this undesirable but critical jobs?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#457

Post by em-bee »

vbezhenar wrote: post #145
ativzzz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

is there a thriving market of FOSS apps on google play? f-droid doesn't count.

anyways, here is a list of FOSS apps on IOS: https://dev.to/devfan/a-curated-list-of-open-source-example-...

Re: A world where people pay for software

#458

Post by spencerflem »

xormapmap wrote: post #442
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

presumably hackers use dishwashers too

Re: A world where people pay for software

#459

Post by TylerE »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #441
TylerE wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mic…

Respectfully, 3d printers are a special case.

People aren’t building a washing machine at home. That takes industrial machinery.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#460

Post by sanderjd »

throwbadubadu wrote: post #297
sanderjd wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, this is true: > Too much software changes just to change. But it doesn't imply this: > I'd say at the very most it needs security updates. What the parent said about "security updates at the very least" is correct, and sometimes that happens to also be the very most updates that should be made. And sometimes it's that but a little bit more . And sometimes it's that and a lot more . The hard part is figuring out t…

> "security updates at the very least" is correct, and sometimes that happens to also be the very most updates that should be made. And a lot of those updates wouldn't be necessary of software and tools wouldn't offer so much attack surfaces, that they wouldn't need if they cared less about those things as necessary features...

Man I dunno. This sounds right and all, but after years of seeing security issues that don't seem to have anything to do with unnecessary attack surface, I have to say that this just seems unrealistic to me. The problem is that no software runs on a machine without an internet connection, and you can't control the attack surface of other software on the machine.
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