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On paying for software

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Re: On paying for software

#141

Post by michaelmrose »

paulcole wrote: post #39
merb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand how you feel and I also think your blog post is correct in many ways. However I think software should be reasonably priced which is most often not the case. And also people can't pay everybody 5-10 dollar/euro for everything, we would quickly need to pay thousands of dollars/euros yearly to access/use everything. That's why I think sometimes having another way of "paying", like through ads or maybe s…

Maybe you just need fewer $5-10 dollar/month things than you think? At that price you could have 100-200 of them before “quickly” needing to pay thousands of dollars yearly.

I have 1278 packages installed on the computer I'm using now it takes 11 items 5-10 bucks a month each to spend 1000 dollars annually.

Thanks open source.

Re: On paying for software

#142

Post by zrobotics »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #34
mherrmann wrote: post #9

As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

Paying for software may be moral , but it certainly isn't natural . As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update…

>>The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.

This may be an acceptable model for games-as-a-service, but how is anyone supposed to make money on single player puzzle or story-driven games? I enjoyed westworld, but I have no desire to replay it. By this same logic, it's also 'unnatural' (whatever you think you mean by that) to pay an author for a book. Some software products don't necessarily fit with your proposed update cycle, there are a significant number of games that get developed, released, and that is it aside from bug fixes.

Re: On paying for software

#143

Post by vram22 »

rootlocus wrote: post #98
matheusmoreira wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here. Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to perform and it costs nothing. Therefore, data is naturally easy to copy. Software doesn't need to be manufactured like physical goods do: the software construction step is fully automated by compilers and build systems. The cost of all this is approximately $0. Networks aren't free…

> Software doesn't need to be manufactured like physical goods do: the software construction step is fully automated by compilers and build systems. Source code surely is manufactured. I write it with my hands, using years of knowledge and experience, spending a lot of time on it.

>Source code surely is manufactured. I write it with my hands, using years of knowledge and experience, spending a lot of time on it.

Right. We not only write it with our hands, but with our brains too, as well as with the effort we put in over years to gain the skills needed to write the software in the first place. Otherwise any newbie programmer could write any of the software in the world, including complex ones.

This reminds me of that story of a senior retired engineer who was called in to diagnose a problem with some expensive, complex machine that he had worked with or operated a lot earlier (and/or maybe had invented). He walks into the room, bends down near the machine, taps it a bit, then makes an X mark with chalk near the bottom left corner. "There's your problem", he says. They open the machine, check that area, and sure enough, the fault is found and fixed. They ask him what his fee is. "$50,000", he replies. "What?", they ask. "$50,000 for making a chalk mark?". "No", he says. "$1 for making the mark. $49,999 for knowing where to make it."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/

Re: On paying for software

#144

Post by michaelmrose »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #127
shawnfratis wrote: post #113

I would not have a problem paying for software if what I was paying for didn't suck. Case in point: I have never been very happy with Win 10 since I got it, but in recent weeks it has become completely unusable, mostly because of their constant upgrades and behind-the-scenes processes that slow my machine down to a crawl. Out of frustration I wiped my drive and installed Ubuntu. Granted, Linux has it's share of probl…

> So, one OS is paid and one isn't. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company) : Canonical achieved a small operating profit of $281,000 in 2009, however until 2017 it struggled to maintain financial solvency and took a major financial hit from the development of Unity and Ubuntu Touch, leading to an operating loss of $21.6 Million for the fiscal year 2013.[19] The company reported an operating pr…

I'm not convinced that unity every added much value to ubuntu it seems like they could have spent a small fraction of the money customizing gnome/cinnamon or actually shipping plasma with up to date deps and come out way ahead both for users and monetarily.

Re: On paying for software

#145

Post by Avshalom »

TimJYoung wrote: post #104
justinclift wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But the original statement was that it does not work . eg 0% success Whereas clearly it can, as there are the occasional success stories. So, it's more than 0%. Maybe not a high percentage yet though. ;)

Yes, but that statement was followed by more details as to exactly what I meant. A model that only works for a small percentage of people does not work . My point is that you can't start a business based upon some vague hope that someday, somehow, someone will possibly choose to donate money to you. You need a reliable stream of income, and one that will keep coming long after the shine has worn off the original prod…

>>My point is that you can't start a business based upon some vague hope that someday, somehow, someone will possibly choose to donate money to you. You need a reliable stream of income, and one that will keep coming long after the shine has worn off the original product and now you're slogging through complicated maintenance and upgrades

What part of that doesn't apply equally proprietary software too?

Re: On paying for software

#147

Post by CJefferson »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #133
afarrell wrote: post #49

One of the reasons that I switched from Linx to OSX was so that I could pay for more of my software. Why? Because then I more of the software I used could be maintained by someone who had the time to dig into bugs and UI problems and to fix them. But in Linux, couldn't I just edit the source myself? Realistically, no. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to source-dive in a totally new project in a language I never…

What in the... You could donate to the FSF, OSI, or directly to the developers of most projects. Did you even bother looking?

For many businesses, and at universities (where I work), there isn't an easy way to donate, particularly to random people.

However, it would be easy for me to spend, say £50-£100, for a support licence for software I frequently use.

I would love it if Microsoft added this to GitHub -- opt in of course.

Re: On paying for software

#148

Post by afarrell »

carapace wrote: post #115

I've always felt that charging money for software is dumb. I, as a programmer, think about saying to other people that they cannot use a piece of software that is already written unless they give me money, is a damn ridiculous idea. Software is wealth. If I had a gold coin that had the property that I could give it to you and still have it, and that both coins would increase in value when I did, and that you and I bo…

> Charging people to use your solution after it's been developed is the stupid thing to do, IMO

I think this is the core of what I disagree with in your post. Imagine 3 scenarios:

1) I have a problem that I'd like solved and I go searching for a solution. After a while, I come across a reddit post where someone says "oh, you're trying to reticulate splines? You should buy ReticulatorPro for $50. I use it and its great!" I see that someone built it 3 years ago and I go and download the 1 month free trial, I'm happy with it and in 1 month, $50 comes out of my bank account.

2) I have a problem that I'd like solved and I go searching for a solution. After a while, I come across a reddit post where someone says "oh, you're trying to reticulate splines? Someone is trying to fundraise to build it and they seem pretty serious." I see that they've been trying for 6 months and they are 70% of the way toward their goal. So I pitch in $50, but then I'm waiting as the uncertainty of fundraising and software schedules takes its toll. 18 months later the solution is released. I am less happy.

3) I have a problem that I'd like solved and I go searching for a solution. After a while, I come across a reddit post where someone says "oh, you're trying to reticulate splines? Someone is trying to fundraise to build that." I see that someone built it 1 year ago and I go and download it for free and I am happy.

In the current world, all of these are possible. In the world you propose, option #1 is impossible. I argue that a world with Option #1 available is a better world for everyone. Why? Because in the world of option #2/#3, the only time period during which the developer can raise money is before the product has been created. That means only products with sufficiently good pre-development marketing can be successful. (note: "Get 10,000 fans who love you" isn't "easy" but at least moderately difficult.) In the world of #1, someone who isn't good at pre-development marketing but is good at building a product and using the quality of the product to do post-development marketing can succeed.

I want a world where someone can build a good product and get funding mostly on the strength of their product.

> teach people

Is a valuable but different skill from building products.

Re: On paying for software

#149

Post by ropeadopepope »

sheetjs wrote: post #121
ropeadopepope wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with open source is, for some reason, the developers feel no sense of obligation to the end users or the people who donate to them. MacOS devs do and will go out of their way to make sure their software is not just usable, but a sheer pleasure to use in every way possible. Yes, there are exceptions (I'm looking at you, Apple, with your Xcode and your Finder) but for the most part that's just the way thing…

> the developers feel no sense of obligation to the end users or the people who donate to them. An open source project creates no obligation on the part of the developers. Open source licenses explicitly indemnify the authors. Receiving something for free and expecting something more is the essence of the entitled behavior that frustrate and burn out many open source developers. A donation is a voluntary gift. Like a…

> An open source project creates no obligation on the part of the developers.

I meant a subconscious obligation, not a legal one. When somebody gives you a gift, it puts pressure on you (subconscious and social) to reciprocate. You see it all the time with youtube streamers, who frequently cater their content to their subscribers wishes to keep them happy. And to clarify, the streamers don't do this because their users are unhappy or protesting. They do it because they feel a sense of obligation to give their subscribers what they want because the subscribers were generous enough to give the streamer money.

For whatever reason, this phenomenon is completely lacking in the open source community. Instead, the opposite seems to occur. OSS developers are actively hostile toward their users, both vocally and how they react to criticism that their software isn't user friendly or respectful of their user's time. Anybody who has spent hours trying to set up a piece of OSS and then made the mistake of asking the developer for help can attest to this.

Re: On paying for software

#150

Post by michaelmrose »

justinclift wrote: post #94
open-source-ux wrote: post #6

Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Are the available options stacked against them? Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients using open source software. But what if you don't want to be a consultant and simply want to charge a business for using your open source product? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can…

> There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. This bit is confusing to me. AFAIK Red Hat doesn't use a dual-licensing approach. Is it something they've recently introduced?

Redhat owns Centos if I recall correctly. Prior to that centos was just a rebuild of all the open source parts of redhats software.
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