Comment by pjmlp
11 hours ago
The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well.
I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis.
Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
That is true, but nowadays most paid projects end up being perpetual subscriptions. Which I kind of get, as on-going maintenance still costs, but it used to be that you paid for a tool once and only paid again if you wanted/needed an updated version. I'd gladly pay $15-$60 for a tool once (and again if I needed an update) but $10-$15 per month for 20 different things (that I will only use occasionally) is just out of reach for me financially and I live in a "rich" first-world country.
Working for a SaaS company is the greatest thing if you are a software developer who doesn't care about business: even if you don't care about business the business cares about you!
There was an article in Byte magazine circa 1983 describing this dilemma: you release a successful 1.0 of a product, get a pulse of money, hold back some of it to develop 2.0, N months later version 2.0 competes with not only your competitors but with 1.0 in the minds of your most satisfied customers. Now if you're planning for N months and it is really N+M they have to scramble for money to pay your paycheck or release the product before it is ready or both. If you're laid off you could be one of the lucky ones because working under those conditions can be a living hell.
I'm glad I'm working on a service because even if a project I am working on is critical to acquiring and retaining customers it's not an automatic crisis that a project is a little late.
In the last 10 years or so SaaS seems like an investor-driven fad driven by the ease of putting a valuation on a consistent cashflow, but I think it is more basic than that.
That's not to say that the 'anti-consumer' concerns aren't real. Also with generative AI we are seeing that some things need to account for the resources they use. In the 2010s I was looking at a family of proto-AI businesses where my business partner and I were struggling with pricing, like we could not set an $X/month price such that (i) some users might not cost 10$X or 100$X a month to serve and (ii) that $X doesn't exceed the value the subscriber would get from the service for many users thus you don't make the sale. Yet we also liked the idea of stable revenue and boy all the software biz people and investors we talked to couldn't see past the "S, M, L, XL" subscription model.
How do you imagine it used to be when everything was commercial?
On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because.
Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
If you're trying to make people cheer for the pirates, you're succeeding.
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Programs were distributed on stacks of diskettes, towards the end of that era on CD-ROMs. There was no licence server to phone home to on the internet.
You bought Borland C++ compiler, installed it and used it - you were free to buy the next version when it came out or not.
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> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
Adobe tools are subscriptions and they get pirated all the time.
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> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place. I don't see how people not using the software while still not becoming customers is a fix to anything.
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"Rent-seeking is the only way to fix piracy" is an interesting take.
It seems to be going very well for video and music streaming services. Piracy is certainly nearly dead at this point and not at all at record-high levels.
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I agree with you in spirit. I also think back to that moment a few years ago where everyone suddenly realized that OpenSSL was being developed almost entirely by one dude with very, very little funding. Fundamental building blocks of modern society that might fail because some poor guy worked himself to death in obscurity because he didn't know how to better ask for help. We should all be haunted by this and consciously urge our employers to be part of the solution and not the problem.
That tangent aside, part of the big problem with paying for tooling is that the tooling itself is typically built on tooling and libraries that are also built on libraries and tooling.... all the way down. To generalize, many of those libraries farthest back in the chain are the least likely to get the sort of funding someone who, eg. writes a wrapper around ffmpeg or whatever might get.
I don't claim to have the solution, but I feel like this topic is the tech equivalent of not worrying about global warming.
If you open an old Byte or Dr Dobbs magazine, it will be full of ads from companies whose business was utility libraries.
Wait, are you saying that all of my VBXs are likely unsupported at this point?
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Neither side can have it both ways, but there's way too much whining about people not paying.
Want people to pay for your tools? Don't offer them for free.
This is related to my usual point here, that if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training, that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy.
Proprietary software is fine. Lying about it and using good ideals as marketing strategy is not. That applies as much to "released as MIT so it be useful to many, then unreleased because author realized it might end up in training data of some LLMs (and in so doing, actually become useful to many people)" software, as it does to blogs and all the whining about AI denying them credit (and pre-AI, search engines, except then the developer community was on side of search and not free-but-with-ads/credit publishers).
> Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step starting a real multi-party relationship, much distinct from just looking at a webpage or playing with code locally, and the poster being a student or younger.
I too strongly favored MIT over everything when I was a kid. Didn't have money to pay for anything, and GPL was complicated and my slightly older colleagues (with probably more business sense than I) didn't like it.
> if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training
Both the GPL and MIT licenses require attribution, so by publishing open-source software, developers are not consenting to LLM training.
So much of people's thinking today makes no sense to me.
Since 2010 there has been an increasing tendency for the likes of Google and Facebook to drain an increasing fraction out of the value out of the web. Around 2012 I had a site that was expensive to host and bleeding money and looking for ways to salvage it and realized that there were many crawlers that were hitting my site hard, harder than Google, and almost all of them, like Chinese webcrawlers, were sending me 0 traffic and making 0 value for me. So I cut them off. Bing was practically in that category, sending barely detectable traffic, but I wanted to support some competition for Google.
As I saw it a few years ago a bunch of people were apoplectic about OpenAI all of a sudden and I'm like, boy they are asleep at the switch, boy are they running in a herd, boy are they slamming on the breaks the next day after they crash their car. I mean like 10 years before that my wife was furious at me because I ran up a balance on our HELOC because of Google trouble.
> if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it
I would wager that an overwhelming majority of people who choose FOSS licenses do so without ever making any grandiose claims about the betterment of humanity. Yet upon any suggestion of a license change, if the project is popular, they get attacked for being a lying scheming rug-puller all the same.
> that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy
Why do you automatically assume they're a liar, and not just someone whose circumstances or opinions changed over time? Or just responding to changes in the competitive landscape or business cycle?
If you release FOSS software, it seems your only socially acceptable options are to keep future versions FOSS forever, or abandon the project entirely if/when your circumstances no longer permit FOSS development. How is that state of affairs beneficial to anyone?
> Proprietary software is fine.
I agree, but our industry also has a vocal minority of open source purists, who treat anything using non-OSI-approved licenses as toxic waste -- even software using a quite generous source-available license.
For B2C software, that situation is manageable: the purists simply won't touch the software, and will loudly pan it on forums like HN, but plenty of others will try it if it's useful.
But for B2B software, it's more problematic, since there are enough open source purists out there that most tech companies employ at least a few, influencing corporate policy about acceptable licenses. If a new B2B software product has no OSI-approved FOSS edition at all, the purists tend to majorly tank adoption, which hugely impacts the business viability of the product.
So if you're bootstrapping a new B2B infrastructure product that doesn't lend itself to SaaS, what license do you pick? If you go FOSS, you severely limit the economic viability of your own work. Or if you go non-FOSS, you severely limit adoption, which then has the same outcome.
> That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step
If it was just about money/payments, then non-OSI "source available" licenses would be far more popular, especially ones that allow the software to be used free/gratis for all situations that don't directly compete with the software creator. Yet instead the widespread attitude towards these licenses seems to be far more mixed. How do you explain that phenomenon?