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I applaud the spirit of this, i.e. in trying to lay out a covenant with the community while still being entrepreneurial about building a commercial business to
by pwang 10y ago
I applaud the spirit of this, i.e. in trying to lay out a covenant with the community while still being entrepreneurial about building a commercial business to fund continued innovation and maintenance of the software.
The problem is that it falls into an outdated framing of the value of software. Namely, as more people around the world have gained significant expertise in coding, the skillsets needed to produce software is commoditizing. That skilled labor used to be scarce, and that meant that the fruit of that labor was scarce, and therefore the artifact itself was the thing to monetize.
Creative and clever licensing around software can "protect" software from certain kinds of things, but they cannot protect the software from being commoditized. And commoditization pressure is very high right now. Over the last 10 years, OSS has permeated into real enterprise adoption, and many of the deep reasons for enterprises to adopt open source software are tied precisely to those commoditizing factors.
So to build a sustainable business around software, you have to tie your price to the actual business value. In our modern times, when the skills to produce software are abundant, the thing that's valuable, then, is creating alignment on your API or framework or service, by earning the greatest mindshare among the collective labor pool that can maintain and innovate on software. And there's a huge virality to that, too - the game of developer mindshare is a winner-take-all game.
All this is to say: don't worry so much about defending the software, because that's not the valuable thing. The community around your software is what determines whether it is relevant 3 years from now. And having weird/new/different licensing terms can stifle the growth of that community.
- slgeorge 10y agoI understand where you're coming from, but I disagree. The skills might be abundant[0] but the effort and knowledge of the domain (business logic) are not available to many. It depends on the domain, games in IOS don't count for example, but I feel like there are lots of situations where the software can be directly monetized. Lets assume that's not true - how do you actually monetize a community? Developers around a 'platform' are difficult to monetize. SaaS works for some things but not everything. The idea that 'developer mindshare is a winner-take-all game' is true if your Google or Facebook - it's a total different game if you're one person or a medium sized software business. [0] I actually don't think this is true. There are abundant skills to do trivial things, but skilled problem solvers for harder classes are still constrained - we can see that by the rocketing salary bands of developers over all compared to the rest of the economy (at least in the USA/Western Europe).
- jcoffland 10y agoThis theory only makes sense if the number of things that need to be coded had remained constant, which isn't the case. There is still an insufficient number of good coders available to meet market demand.
- thatfrenchguy 10y ago> Namely, as more people around the world have gained significant expertise in coding, the skillsets needed to produce software is commoditizing I wish you were right, because finding good engineers is REALLY hard.
- clarry 10y agoAnd finding good software can be really hard.
- njharman 10y agoBeing hard to find does not mean they are scarce. Also, sadly, it does not take good engineers to produce software. There are tons of average and bad engineers. They produce a lot of software. It only takes good engineers produce maintainable, efficient, less buggy software.
- pwang 10y agoAgreed. What a lot of people here in HN don't seem to realize is that the reason why Software Is Eating the World is because software can be really really bad, and still be better than not-software. When presented with "a pile of enterprise Java garbage code produced by crap devs that just barely works", your software customer's BATNA is "pencil and paper". That's a low bar.