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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#531

Post by singlow »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #520
singlow wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the development of Excel 2003 not benefit from all of the work done in the previous versions? Even if it had been a from-scratch rewrite, which it was not, it would have still benefited from the design iteration and experience of the development team in solving the same problems in previous versions. Excel 2003 was not a first-release that was suddenly a refined product that would be useful for years without addi…

By the same logic someone could claim that 1985 Excel was in fact based on the preceding 20 years of mainframe and minicomputer software and the very first spreadsheet-esque programs. And that those were in turn based on the ideas of Von Neuman & co. from 1945 of tabulating numbers efficiently, and so on and so forth in roughly equivalent leaps all the way back to the first abacus. It's so reductive of a perspective…

No human being except you, apparently.

I think it is a pretty clear line between attributing the quality of a piece of software to two decades of prior development at the same company, with its own continuity of developers and institutional knowledge, as opposed to the general benefits all software gains from the industry advances it builds upon.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#532

Post by matu3ba »

BSEdlMMldESB wrote: post #435
matu3ba wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that is not how human nature works. Value itself depends on the necessity or desire of people for a product and is distributed via the money printing debt system. In other words: Necessary value can only exist, if other humans have a problem and depend on somebody/something to solve it (temporarily). Explaining valuation from individual desire is hard, but group desire depends on techniques to control t…

the necessity of debt to measure and trade is dubious at best, selfish and evil at worst people advocating for this are on the receiving end of a very extractive and destructive system

> the necessity of debt to measure and trade is dubious at best, selfish and evil at worst

This is not what I wrote or meant, but I do agree that it could be understand like that. It would be of course better to measure necessity with something else, but so far approaches to replace it have failed for various reasons.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#533

Post by Chris2048 »

geocar wrote: post #530
Chris2048 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can have a lottery what happens if the lottery "winners" refuse?

Many western countries use a lottery to choose juries. If the winners refuse, they'll have a chance to explain themselves, and then they'll be judged by those who didn't refuse. Exactly what happens next depends.

Jury duty is one off, and often compensated. It also isn't clearly undesirable - it's a lottery for different reasons.

What would you do in the scenario described for people who refuse any undesirable work?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#534

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Chris2048 wrote: post #529
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been writing ship software, for my entire career. Most times, I’ve been quite involved in the entire process; from napkin sketch to shrinkwrap. For me, it is quite gratifying to ship, but for many people, the 50% (or more) of shipping software that is non-coding work, isn’t fun, and is usually deprecated, during the planning process. Examples are things like end-user documentation (not just maintenance docs), tr…

see https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html

That's a great read!

Re: A world where people pay for software

#535

Post by TaylorAlexander »

Chris2048 wrote: post #526
guidoism wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (honestly non-snarky) answer is: who cares? Do we really need all of the programmers that are currently being employed? Will society collapse if there aren't 100,000 working on the next photo sharing app? The important stuff will get done. Anything that is a luxury will get done only if someone wants to do it for themselves or if someone can convince another person to do it. Money doesn't need to disappear under a…

> My (honestly non-snarky) answer > 100,000 working on the next photo sharing app? hmm.. There are plenty of programmers that don't work for FB et al companies. A lot of modern infrastructure depends of custom software. We probably don't need Twitter (although the cultural impact of SMN might be important e.g. #meetoo, arab-spring etc). > The important stuff will get done. Yes, it will. You know how? Because the impo…

> Yes, it will. You know how? Because the importance will inspire more money to be offered.

Actually I am the lead engineer and maintainer on an open source farming robot project. I do get paid enough to cover my bills, but the pay is less than 50% what I could earn at any of the companies which repeatedly pester me on linkedin. But the work I am doing is more important to me than all that. I am doing the work for less money specifically because it is important.

In a world where we have community control of the means of production, what does it mean for work to be important? It means our community members need us to solve problems so they can grow food, make clothes, and build shelter. Caring for one another is in our DNA, literally! There is no specific monetary incentive required, the care for community members is already enough incentive. The only reason we need to pay people huge sums of money for some SAAS app is that the work is nearly meaningless to us. The money is the only thing that makes it worthwhile. But if we don't need money, we can work on what really matters. And when we open source the results of the work we needed, many others will find that it solves their problems too, perhaps with modest changes, so they don't need to reinvent the wheel over and over again. This means the work goes farther for the same effort.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#536

Post by loup-vaillant »

patrec wrote: post #430
loup-vaillant wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

, obviously. A couple remarks: Just because someone is proposing something for a small slice of society, doesn’t mean they intend to propose something similar for all of society. For instance, insisting on free schools, free (rail) roads, free health care, free water, and nationalised energy plants doesn’t mean they want to make everything free, or that they want to nationalise everything, or that they are nostalgic…

> Just because someone is proposing something for a small slice of society, doesn’t mean they intend to propose something similar for all of society Yup, a "small slice of society" that's just proverbially eating the world. > remember that as Thatcher was saying capitalism/neoliberalism was natural, she did "nudge" things along by having the army pay a visit to workers on strike. Unfortunately things never happening…

> Yup, a "small slice of society" that's just proverbially eating the world.

Software may be everywhere, but last time I checked very few of us actually write it. Something similar can be said about food: everyone has to eat, but relatively few people actually grow crops. And even if we were to implement UBI for everyone, it’s an idea that was around for quite some time, with weaker versions of it implemented for decades now. It didn’t kill capitalism, let alone spread communism (whatever that means) all over the world — or any single major Western country.

> Unfortunately things never happening at times gets in the way of me remembering them.

Sorry, my facts weren’t quite right: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/03/margaret-th...

Thatcher only planned to use the army and declare a state of emergency. Actual repression only used regular police forces… resulting in quite a few injuries, as well as trumped up charges (that turned out to have been fabricated by the police if my link is to be believed): https://www.history.com/news/margaret-thatcher-miners-strike... Also remember what a strike is: people stopping to work because they don’t want something. Something they reject so badly they’re willing to sacrifice their income to prevent it.

So my main point remains: what Thatcher did was far from natural, not to mention contrary to of the will of her people. You could deny that if you want, but to be honest it would be more an expression of your allegiances than your actual beliefs. (Then again, people have an uncanny ability to tailor their beliefs to suit their allegiances…)

Re: A world where people pay for software

#537

Post by icecream_so_gud »

NickNaraghi wrote: post #109
jovial_cavalier wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly, you are not getting one piece of software. You get access to everything in their library, like a spotify subscription. You also choose which developer gets your $5 or whatever, so you retain the meritocratic infrastructure that a traditional marketplace provides.

Now that you mention it, the spotify subscription is actually very interesting here. A bundled subscription for all the software you use could make sense (though it would probably by 10-100x the cost of a spotify subscription). However, OP's resource allocation model (each user determines which developer gets their payment) doesn't make sense to me. I think it would be better to prototype multiple resource allocation…

Bundling of SaaS apps would be a great idea.

OAuth might one way to enable it. Instead of logging in via Google/Facebook/Apple you could login via "SaaSBundler", this would register you've used that product which could help allocate the distribution of funds. Might need some more work if you wanted to distribute based on time

Re: A world where people pay for software

#538

Post by vishnugupta »

themadturk wrote: post #298
JohnFen wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. There's some truth to this, but I think this factor is usually dramatically overstated. At least, most of the software I use doesn't need to constantly change. The majority of software updates I see are unnecessary, and many of them are undesirable.

A company I worked for 12 years ago was using a version of Microsoft Navision (now Microsoft Dynamics or something). They hadn't upgraded for several years. Upgrading would have meant a bunch of workstations would have needed to use newer versions of Windows beyond XP. Navision was largely unsupported (only by a consultant, not by MS) and of course the workstations were dangerously behind (yes, we were definitely on…

> ...held together with chewing gum and duct tape

> ..not everything has to change to continue to work...

That was sort of my argument; you could make do without changing the software but the cost keeps increasing and the user base keeps shrinking. At some point it'll be down to that one customer who refuses to budge and will be asked to make a tough choice; upgrade to the latest version or hire developers yourself to support...and even that may become impossible if h/w guys stop manufacturing that old machine configuration.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#539

Post by MichaelZuo »

singlow wrote: post #531
MichaelZuo wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same logic someone could claim that 1985 Excel was in fact based on the preceding 20 years of mainframe and minicomputer software and the very first spreadsheet-esque programs. And that those were in turn based on the ideas of Von Neuman & co. from 1945 of tabulating numbers efficiently, and so on and so forth in roughly equivalent leaps all the way back to the first abacus. It's so reductive of a perspective…

No human being except you, apparently. I think it is a pretty clear line between attributing the quality of a piece of software to two decades of prior development at the same company, with its own continuity of developers and institutional knowledge, as opposed to the general benefits all software gains from the industry advances it builds upon.

No it's not a clear line at all. In fact Lotus 1-2-3 was literally the direct predecessor from IBM in terms of everything but the brand name and some design choices.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#540

Post by abandonliberty »

Panzer04 wrote: post #387
crazygringo wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I paid $10 each time I showed up. This could be a useful model for rarely-used software. But it already is. Pay for a month and then cancel. Repeat each time you need it. I don't understand why people are assuming you have to pay continuously for years instead of just paying for the months you actually use.

It's a bit frustrating having to "subscribe" and cancel almost everything. I barely signup to anything and I still forget that I'm subscribed to things. Companies are fully aware that many, many people forget about charges on their card and leech off those for extended periods.

You can immediately cancel after purchase. It seems like legally they have to allow you to keep the software until the end of the current period.
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