31–40 of 328 posts
> A service has constant administration costs which are paid by the service provider. A properly designed library instead moves these costs to the users of the library. I agree with the articles point, but this introduction, right there, is why it's not happening. SaaS turns your startup into a unicorn and yourself into a rich person. Or at least that's what you are hoping/aiming for. A library is not going to make y…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stealing a library is easier than stealing a service.
Yes. I suppose it’s the same with installable software. But it sells anyway.
This is very sound advice. That being said it's incredibly hard to follow this advice in environments which encourage a polyglot stack and 'the best tool for the job' mindset. The moment you have more than one language in your stack it becomes easier to build services than to maintain libraries in each language. You can of course write native C libraries with bindings to different languages but that's a bit weird. It…
It also doesn't have to be C, just anything that compiles to a native binary lib.
1990s advice on a 1990s website. It's the opposite. We need to move away from package hell by splitting our work in two opposite directions: on the one hand, we should move back to large, effective standard libraries; on the other hand, we should move toward more services, fewer library packages. A project shouldn't need more than a few packages, usually for something like a database connection protocol. Working with…
- Standard libraries always go bad over time as idioms change and they don't have a policy for breaking changes
- Services do not compose as easily as libraries. Composition is key to code reuse.
I understand most off the industry deals with terrible libraries, and many of you long for simpler times, but the proliferation of complexity will occur with or without the NPMs of the world, as the industry grows and functions in a economy that doesn't care about externalities, including endemic stupid extra complexity.
> A service has constant administration costs which are paid by the service provider. A properly designed library instead moves these costs to the users of the library. I agree with the articles point, but this introduction, right there, is why it's not happening. SaaS turns your startup into a unicorn and yourself into a rich person. Or at least that's what you are hoping/aiming for. A library is not going to make y…
Do people not sell software licenses anymore? (In theory nothing prevents you from making your license require recurring payment as well)