Comment by sexyman48
4 months ago
Steve Ballmer nailed it when he said GPL is a cancer. No professional programmer wants to open source anything, but once one competitor does it, he must follow suit to stay competitive.
4 months ago
Steve Ballmer nailed it when he said GPL is a cancer. No professional programmer wants to open source anything, but once one competitor does it, he must follow suit to stay competitive.
Um not down voting you, but your argument has some flaws.
Firstly your appeal to authority , and then using Steve Ballmer as your authority is perhaps not the best way to start.
Secondly you say that "no professional programmer" - but the statement is false. For starters it's a sweeping generalization which is trivial to show is untrue for at least 1 programmer.
Thirdly the existence of Open Source alternatuve does not make a product uncompetitive. You need look no further than Windows to see that's true. Indeed if we has to list all the commercial software that exists with an Ooen Source clone, we'd be here all day. I'd also argue that Joe public doesn't even know what open source is, much less factors it into a buying decision.
If you are building tools for programmers (already a tiny niche target market) then you need a hook other than Open Source anyway, cause programmers are a terrible target market.
I say this as someone who builds tools for programmers, and who sells commercial into a space that contains Open Source alternatives. And I do ok.
Quoting Steve Ballmer doesn't mean that the person is worshipping Steve Ballmer as a god. It just means that another person expressed a similar opinion.
You can't add color to your argument if you've failed to add an argument. If all you've typed is an appeal to authority, you're trying to trick people into making your argument for you by trying to guess what Ballmer meant and why he thought that.
Instead of getting people to try and come up with an argument that wasn't made, the argument could have just been made. But I'm sure it is a very bad argument, or else there wouldn't be that embarrassment to try.
1 reply →
[dead]
The marginal cost of software is zero and therefore the just price in a perfect market is zero. You can compete on delivering features quickly (and that's how all 80-00s software was - they were able to charge simply because no one was offering same features yet), but other than that there is no way software can be a profitable product without being a monopoly - and monopolies is not a thing to be tolerated. You can sell customer support, you can sell services, you cannot really sell software forever. Hate this as much as you want, but that's how things are.
Looking out across the software landscape, it seems to me software companies do just fine if they achieve some-to-most of:
1. Build a piece of software that actually solves one or more problems.
2. Keep ownership private and limited. Once you're publicly traded, long term planning becomes impossible and "line must go up" becomes the reigning false god.
3. Sell a perpetual commercial license to the version-at-purchase, and offer subscription for updates after purchase. On cancellation, stop providing updates but do not disable that customer's last working version.
4. Optionally, dual license under a free license that prevents competitors from eating your lunch (usually latest GPL or AGPL, depending on context).
If you're implementing the above items, it's absolutely possible to run a profitable company.
> 2. Keep ownership private and limited. Once you're publicly traded, long term planning becomes impossible and "line must go up" becomes the reigning false god.
You can fight this with dual-class ownership. Google and Meta can do whatever they want because nobody can change their board.
They're still motivated to care about share price because they pay their employees in shares, but you're going to have to get the money to pay employees from somewhere.
Small nit pick: this only works if the perpetually licensed product does not have running costs for you.