A world where people pay for software • Hacker News Board

Re: A world where people pay for software

#481

Post by drekipus » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 3:23 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #405

thorncorona wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact same answer every leftist I've talked to says when I ask them who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewers.

The obvious answer is "pay people more". If we had UBI, for instance, and people did not have to work in order to have basic needs (food and shelter) met, then the willingness to do unpleasant jobs like sewer cleaning will go down, and it'll be necessary to pay people more to do that work. And the need to pay people more will then drive technological innovation that may today not be worthwhile because "just hire some…

> UBI plus a free market

If there's a ubi, then there's price floor that is higher than a non ubi price floor, meaning that the median prices of goods go up, less taxes to find the ubi, and the ubi must then increase to meet the increased costs for a basic standard of living.

Well done you invented inflation.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#482

Post by drekipus » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 3:31 AM UTC

austinsharp wrote: post #423

guidoism wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to think about how this works at smaller scales. When there is an office full of people all being paid about the same and (critically) where they all want and care about the same outcome, the shit jobs will get done. I have often called myself a "code janitor" since I clean up shit that was left behind. It's not because I didn't want to be working on fun greenfield projects but because it was shit that just ne…

Seems like the key shared characteristic of these examples are small communities where people care about each other. As you say, it works at smaller scales. But free rider problems are a lot tougher in a community of millions or more.

I live in one of those communities (eco village in Australia) and all it takes is one old haggard lady to reduce the workforce to nothing, as no one wants to put up with her abuse.

I think one thing people keep forgetting is that all these problems have already been solved for hundreds and thousands of years. You will never reduce inequality, abuse, pain, suffering. It's much better to contribute and improve what we already have rather than to rip it out and try "yet another variation of the same utopia that we've all been thinking about".

Build towards it, not "start again "

Re: A world where people pay for software

#483

Post by drekipus » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 3:31 AM UTC

smolder wrote: post #407

nickff wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "But I also have the view that people are very malleable and can conform to all sorts of social structures and belief systems." This is another view common to most (Marxist) communists, the belief in society's ability to cultivate the 'socialist man'.

Okay, so are you disputing what I said? Various disparate religions and ideologies have cultivated adherents with notable success across history -- not least among them is free-market capitalism.

It's less of a belief and more of an emergent property of liberty and maths

Re: A world where people pay for software

#484

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 3:32 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #369

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I have some audio waveform generation software I use only once in a long while. I paid about $50 for it almost 5 years ago. If it were SaaS, I'd have paid a lot more than that over the last 5 years. A long time ago I worked out an agreement with a local gym. To avoid a membership that I would only need for a few months (I was living in a hotel temporarily with no access to my own equipment), I paid $10 each time…

> 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.

Because the friction of signing up, going through any onboarding process and then canceling a month later (assuming cancelling isn't major hassle) is a pain in the ass that I don't want to have to deal with.

I don't think you realize that people willingly pay for convenience.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#485

Post by nine_k » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 3:33 AM UTC

pfannkuchen wrote: post #332

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #306

Computers have an unprecedented ability to reproduce value for free. Programmers need a relatively fixed amount of resources to thrive. (The value of resources varies by location but we all need things like food, shelter, transportation, clothing, tools, etc etc) If we can find a way to make sure every person has what they need to thrive regardless of their income, programmers can open source all of their software an…

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 don't see why people can't gather and pay someone to design a good dishwasher, even if a lot of other things were available for free.

There is a lot of open-source software, and still software development contractors exist and do well, all the while they may use 90%-100% open-source stacks to solve a client's problem.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#486

Post by TylerE » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 4:04 AM UTC

beckingz wrote: post #468

TylerE wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, 3d printers are a special case. People aren’t building a washing machine at home. That takes industrial machinery.

If I could pay rent and feed myself regardless, I would design this out of spite.

Design is the easy bit. It's getting engineers to do the boring stuff like making sure it doesn't burn your house down in the middle of the night.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#487

Post by thfuran » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 4:05 AM UTC

chromoblob wrote: post #450

thfuran wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they aren't. You can only buy the buggy processors that exist, not notional bugless ones.

As if processors were only sold by alien gods, and processors without bugs were impossible to create.

They may not be impossible to make, but they don't get made. And I guess you think Microsoft has been putting bugs in Windows for the last few decades just for something to do, or was that also the influence of alien gods?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#488

Post by vel0city » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 4:19 AM UTC

grishka wrote: post #466

vel0city wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only ever updated to add new APIs for apps and drivers to support new hardware features Sounds like it's not "finished" if it needs all these updates. As for why change the window dressing, the market for style changes over time. Why do car companies change the look of their products? Why does the outside of a cereal box ever change? Do the inside of our houses today look the same as the 80s? The 70s? The 40s? Are…

> As for why change the window dressing, the market for style changes over time. Software is a tool, a means to an end. It doesn't need to participate in fashion. > Are you arguing that Windows and MacOS should continue to look like it's 1.0 release? Yes. It should remain an option at least. Not the literal "1.0", but the version when a decent UX was figured out. For Windows in particular, that's clearly 95. I know p…

> that's clearly 95

I wouldn't say that's very clear. There were still lots of refinements and redesign that happened as Windows started becoming more of a multi-user OS with NT and later XP. Just because there was a classic skin in 7 doesn't mean it was the same UX. Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI.

Maybe you find 95 to be the end-all be-all of design, but many don't. UI, and to an extent UX, is partially subjective and then also very different based on the user. Imagine a user who has only used an iPad gets dropped in front of a Windows 95 machine, would they consider it the peak of OS UI/UX design?

And as the product's target market evolves and changes so too should the software for what customers expect. Which brings me to...

> Software is a tool, a means to an end. It doesn't need to participate in fashion.

One could make the same argument of a bed or a couch or hell even a whole house. A house is just a tool, something to keep the environment consistent and shelter from the elements. A couch is just a tool to support a sitting human being. It doesn't need to participate in fashion. And yet people are pretty dang picky about their furniture choices and paint comes in thousands of colors.

Any piece software competes in a market of software. Say there's two pieces of software with identical feature sets. One looks like an ancient Java Swing UI and has bad colors and overall just looks ugly, meanwhile the other looks nice and pleasing (insert your own ideas of "nice and pleasing" here). One is probably going to hemorrhage users over time, can you imagine which?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#489

Post by singlow » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 5:31 AM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #273

singlow wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confused because the 2003 version of those products had already had as many as 20 years of maintenance, in the form of prior releases upon which they were based. Word was first released in 1983 and Excel in 1985.

The 1985 version of Excel was Mac only. The 2003 version is about as closely related as iOS is to Mac System 7. If you don't understand Excel's history, it's better to not make such a bizarre claim.

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 additional maintenance. I used Excel a few times in the 80s, and regularly through the 90s and early 2000s on Macs and Windows and wrote quite a bit of VBA for them professionally.

What part of my claim is bizarre? My claim is simply that Word and Excel had 20 years of history prior to the 2003 release. Your claim that it was originally written on a different OS is not really a reasonable counter-argument. The Windows version of Excel came out 2 years after the Mac version, so that only knocks the history of the "Windows" version down to 16 years.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#490

Post by SequoiaHope » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 5:32 AM UTC

manoDev wrote: post #471

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally the broad concept I work with is “community ownership of the means of production”. What this means is that you are part owner in a cooperative of cooperatives that owns the machinery you depend upon for your well being. Of course your community trades with others and you and everyone have free choice to vote how you please and contribute as you desire. There is no “enforcement” that prevents you from accumu…

> A world with community ownership of the means of production You seem to be trying really hard to avoid the word "communism". Is it a banned word in HN?

It’s not an officially banned word but I live in the USA and folks turn off their brain if you advocate for communism. Also it’s not very specific to advocate for communism because doing so leaves things quite open to interpretation. Would that mean I want Soviet style communism? Chinese style communism? Advocating for “community ownership of the means of production” is precise without being overly proscriptive. I’m not talking about a government at all - we can achieve this ownership a variety of ways. Way better to discuss specifics than use a term that will cause a million comments like “we tried that and it failed”. This openness allows people to decide on their own how the goal might be achieved instead of believing I am going to come in like Lenin or Mao and push a specific plan. I don’t want to do that!