Comment by tliltocatl
4 months ago
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.