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Write "Freehold" Software

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Re: Write "Freehold" Software

#11

Post by badgersnake »

throwpoaster wrote: post #10

There is a cost-revenue pairing issue with traditional software business models: if someone pays upfront, how do you pay to deliver bug fixes? In games that offer any kind of multi it's worse because you have continued server costs as well. One could say, for example, "ship bug free" or perhaps more reasonably, "include the net present value of future costs". Both of those are essentially infeasible. Subscription mod…

Support contract if you want updates, or limited free support for critical bugs. If you want the next major with more feature you pay again.

Re: Write "Freehold" Software

#12

Post by imoverclocked »

badgersnake wrote: post #11
throwpoaster wrote: post #10

There is a cost-revenue pairing issue with traditional software business models: if someone pays upfront, how do you pay to deliver bug fixes? In games that offer any kind of multi it's worse because you have continued server costs as well. One could say, for example, "ship bug free" or perhaps more reasonably, "include the net present value of future costs". Both of those are essentially infeasible. Subscription mod…

Support contract if you want updates, or limited free support for critical bugs. If you want the next major with more feature you pay again.

Welcome back to the 90s; I miss that model of software, as do a lot of people. When you buy something, you still have that something. It may become obsolete in time but as long as you have the hardware/OS that can run it, you still have access to it.

I worked in a daycare center when I was in my teens. I saw a kid (doing a kid thing) with a bag of skittles. He was giving it out to his friends but licking each skittle as he handed them out. I did put a stop to it but I had to stop chuckling to myself at the faces everyone made when getting a pre-licked skittle first. Fast forward a few decades and software subscriptions remind me of that moment, every single time.

Re: Write "Freehold" Software

#14

Post by dceddia »

badgersnake wrote: post #11
throwpoaster wrote: post #10

There is a cost-revenue pairing issue with traditional software business models: if someone pays upfront, how do you pay to deliver bug fixes? In games that offer any kind of multi it's worse because you have continued server costs as well. One could say, for example, "ship bug free" or perhaps more reasonably, "include the net present value of future costs". Both of those are essentially infeasible. Subscription mod…

Support contract if you want updates, or limited free support for critical bugs. If you want the next major with more feature you pay again.

Sketch, CleanShot, and Jetbrains come to mind as software that uses this model. It seems the most fair to me: pay once, get forever usage of the software, and one year of free updates. After that, additional years of updates are often a discounted rate.

An issue I ran into when I tried this with my software is that it’s not a very common model so people didn’t really get it. They’d call it a subscription, or they’d call it lifetime, and some got very angry when I mentioned anything about renewing for updates.

It’s a hard thing to describe succinctly, and it’s even harder to ensure that description survives the game of telephone as they tell their friends/followers.

Re: Write "Freehold" Software

#15

Post by bee_rider »

It is sort of funny that the one type of software that manages to get any momentum behind it for this sort of thing—games—is really pointless (I enjoy games too, I just don’t think preserving most of them is a big deal).

For work software, it definitely should be able to run locally and without any license server or whatever. I’m baffled by people who don’t feel the need to own their tools. Open Source software mostly seems to fill this gap for me, but like most of the folks here, I only really need programming tools, which are over-represented in the open source ecosystem for obvious reasons.

Proprietary “freehold” software, I dunno. It could be interesting. I guess I kinda feel like: if your software isn’t going to do DRM, talk to license servers, or whatever, I guess your business model must include the fact that people will probably make unauthorized copies of your software. So, maybe just open source it? Then you have the classic “building a business on my open source library” problem, which is very hard, but at least you have lots of company.

Re: Write "Freehold" Software

#16

Post by john01dav »

dceddia wrote: post #14
badgersnake wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Support contract if you want updates, or limited free support for critical bugs. If you want the next major with more feature you pay again.

Sketch, CleanShot, and Jetbrains come to mind as software that uses this model. It seems the most fair to me: pay once, get forever usage of the software, and one year of free updates. After that, additional years of updates are often a discounted rate. An issue I ran into when I tried this with my software is that it’s not a very common model so people didn’t really get it. They’d call it a subscription, or they’d c…

An easy way to solve this, at least long term and collectively, is to have a new term that refers to this model. I'd call it "the JetBrains model".

Re: Write "Freehold" Software

#17

Post by dceddia »

john01dav wrote: post #16
dceddia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sketch, CleanShot, and Jetbrains come to mind as software that uses this model. It seems the most fair to me: pay once, get forever usage of the software, and one year of free updates. After that, additional years of updates are often a discounted rate. An issue I ran into when I tried this with my software is that it’s not a very common model so people didn’t really get it. They’d call it a subscription, or they’d c…

An easy way to solve this, at least long term and collectively, is to have a new term that refers to this model. I'd call it "the JetBrains model".

In my case there's not really one product I can expect everyone to know about, but I think this works well when there's an existing big product in the category to point to as an example.

Re: Write "Freehold" Software

#18

Post by idle_zealot »

The term the author is looking for is Freeware or Shareware.

In today's world the equivalent is FOSS. You don't really have ownership of software if you can't modify it, or pay someone else to. Not having source code is itself a sort of DRM.

Re: Write "Freehold" Software

#19

Post by dpassens »

idle_zealot wrote: post #18

The term the author is looking for is Freeware or Shareware. In today's world the equivalent is FOSS. You don't really have ownership of software if you can't modify it, or pay someone else to. Not having source code is itself a sort of DRM.

No, the author explicitly mentions that paid software would also meet those definitions, provided you only need to pay once.

Re: Write "Freehold" Software

#20

Post by dpassens »

bee_rider wrote: post #15

It is sort of funny that the one type of software that manages to get any momentum behind it for this sort of thing—games—is really pointless (I enjoy games too, I just don’t think preserving most of them is a big deal). For work software, it definitely should be able to run locally and without any license server or whatever. I’m baffled by people who don’t feel the need to own their tools. Open Source software mostl…

The big difference between open source and proprietary but freehold seems to be precisely that those copies are unauthorized. That already eliminates most of your competition as nobody else can sell your software and distributions can't just distribute it. Sure, people will pirate, but even DRM doesn't seem to prevent that.
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