6 ms·

Inside a mildew-covered Tudor barn, and primed with much whiskey, Dave Thomas convinced me that the Open Source Movement was bad for invention and progress: Whe

by geocar 8y ago

Inside a mildew-covered Tudor barn, and primed with much whiskey, Dave Thomas convinced me that the Open Source Movement was bad for invention and progress: Where it may do good, it also robbed developers of the opportunity to be paid fairly for their work, and that was bad. Once upon a time, you could make a piece of software and sell it for $1m, but now you are competing with someone who would take a little "free software" and sell their consulting on top of it. You may be able to take pride in the quality of your work, but that consultant can't afford to so he won't. And things get worse. If you sell a piece of popular software to many people for $100 each you could still make a lot of money, but how does your consultant fit into this? You're still competing with him, and he's willing to build on top of someone elses' work to do so. He's not delivering $100 worth of value (and doesn't charge that much either), so how can you still afford to make great software? I feel shame if I can't make good software, and I don't want to make software so badly that I'll make bad software, but nobody pays well enough to make good software, and the market is so messed up it's almost impossible to sell commercial software that isn't bundled up as a solution of some kind. I can get around this some by selling SAAS on prem., but there's a limited utility in this: I could never build a new Smalltalk this way. Rust and Go have seemingly massive benefactors, but paying meagre salaries to their swarms of developers and activists: Nobody is getting rich but the vassals who were already rich to begin with. I've got a great idea for a new kind of programming language, but I don't have even a few million I can spend building it. It makes me sad that I can get paid so much more to not make software than I can get paid to make software.

matfil 8y ago
Twenty years ago (crikey, that long?), I was a pretty vocal Open Source advocate. At the time, it seemed like the only way to avoid a Microsoft monoculture, and I'm still not sure that wasn't true. But now we're seeing monocultures of corporate-sponsored open source (Chrome/Blink's dominance seems particularly alarming in this sense), and managers who are more reluctant than ever to accept technical solutions which aren't "standard". I'd love to know how to bring back a bit more diversity to everyday computing. Beyond using niche systems for hobby projects, leverage seems rather limited right now.
- geocar 8y ago
  The Cloud is similarly tricky: As we can factor our non-essential costs and push them to someone who can trade on their efficiency- there may still be competitors to Amazon, but monoculture is creating a strangling-effect there as well. I'm hoping that privacy and legislative effects will force companies to pull more things in-house so that they can provide controls and guarantees about their use. This can be good for software: If your medical data has to be on-prem, they have to build the right security controls to do so. If it can be in the Cloud, then they just need the security controls on paper. That creates a risk that maybe we can convince people to understand.
  - matfil 8y ago
    I'm certainly with you on The Cloud. I've been expecting a backlash for a while, but not much sign of it so far. A big monthly bill from $CLOUD_VENDOR_OF_CHOICE seems to have become this century's equivalent of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM". Makes me think: a few years ago, there was some or other beer in the UK that was (heavily) advertised with the slogan "reassuringly expensive". The Cloud vendors (perhaps AWS in particular) seem to be going down that path a bit. Very interesting to juxtapose the reluctance to pay for software with an apparent eagerness to pay for Cloud services.
    - geocar 8y ago
      Stella! And then everyone started calling it "wife beater", because whilst it was slightly more expensive, it had a higher alcohol content. Weirdly I predict a similar fate: I expect some Cloud employee will walk off with some banks cloud-hosted server containing gobs of financial data (if it hasn't happened already) and that'll be the end of that. There'll probably be a rush of "security enhanced" cloud solutions after that, but it'll probably hurt them badly in the process.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    With language runtimes abstracting OS and hardware, the Cloud providers have become the new OSes, and coupled with the Web, we are back to the timesharing days, with the browser as a pretty VT100.
zeveb 8y ago
Nothing stops the others who are contributing to that consultant’s underlying free software from taking pride in their work. Nothing stops you from spending your bench time improving (or replacing!) that free software with others. Free Software is good for the users of software, which is ultimately good for developers, because ultimately we're all users of software first and developers second.
- geocar 8y ago
  Mine; yours, and everyones salary is based on the value our contribution brings to our customers needs. If we spend it making software, and we're competing with people working for free, we are simply not going to make as much money as we could be doing something else, so here's what happens: People who love writing software, who are basically willing to work for free, will continue to write software. Some of them are good, but most of them are not. People who are good at writing software, are also probably good at other things, and they will not program. We have a similar problem with teachers: Surely you have heard teachers get paid poorly! We could pay them more and attract smart good teachers, or the smart good people who could also teach will do something else. Free Software is still good, and I don't think it's useful to confuse the issue by pretending I'm saying otherwise.
  - mistrial9 8y ago
    > Mine; yours, and everyones salary is based on the value our contribution brings to our customers needs. this is tragically naive ; the role of business management is to control and reduce price of inputs, every time. If something absolutely vital, essential, mission-critical can be obtained for less and less dollars out, it will be done. This is a prime "function of markets and competition" .. if you are talking about salt or eggs in a subsistance population, things can go well.. in a world-connected, skills-based post-industrial world, it results in exactly what you see .. millions of 20-somethings with more years of college and better health than their parents, struggling to break-even to just survive, etc. etc.
    - geocar 8y ago
pjmlp 8y ago
I see the major culprints devs that want to get paid, while refusing wholeheartedly to pay in any form for the work of others. We see it all the time here, a forum supposedly for people doing their own business projects. A ShowHN of any commercial tool is followed by endless threads of commercial software is evil and free clones or partial implementations to avoid paying for such tool. So that leaves enterprise shops as the only customers to make money off selling tooling.
- geocar 8y ago
  This is definitely a big factor, but when did it occur? A long time ago I purchased Turbo C++, and then Watcom, but as soon as GCC got good enough I never paid for another compiler again. I would love to make a great compiler, but how could I afford to when I'm competing with free?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    GCC is a good example. Since we are talking about Smalltalk here. We had Energize C++, C++ Builder as C++ RAD tooling, which failed to win any representative market share. And if it wasn't for Apple sponsoring the initial work in clang, the open source C and C++ tooling would be much worse than what was achieved the last decade.
  - xfer 8y ago
    Well, look at lispworks for example, that compiler costs $1500 for a hobbyist edition, i can't afford to pay for that. Maybe if you price your product reasonably for end users you can still sell software(including compilers/devtools), a lot of people pay for sublime text.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Sublime Text is a good example that always gets posts about devs not wanting to pay for a mere $80 for a perpetual license, valid across all supported OSes, in spite of making much more than that per hour in many world regions.
LfLxfxxLxfxx 8y ago
This argument assumes developers have access to the market. In reality most of us are not in a position to benefit directly from selling software, regardless of how "good" or "bad" it is. We can only sell our labour for a pre-negotiated salary to an employer who will then pocket the profits. In such an environment, sharing, taking pride in, and building upon each other's work makes a lot of sense and works in the developer's long-term interest (as well as your employer-du-jour's). Free software, just like proprietary, could be of good or bad quality. This depends on the people who wrote it, not so much on the choice of licensing terms. > It makes me sad that I can get paid so much more to not make software than I can get paid to make software. I can relate.

by geocar 8y ago

matfil 8y ago

Twenty years ago (crikey, that long?), I was a pretty vocal Open Source advocate. At the time, it seemed like the only way to avoid a Microsoft monoculture, and I'm still not sure that wasn't true. But now we're seeing monocultures of corporate-sponsored open source (Chrome/Blink's dominance seems particularly alarming in this sense), and managers who are more reluctant than ever to accept technical solutions which aren't "standard". I'd love to know how to bring back a bit more diversity to everyday computing. Beyond using niche systems for hobby projects, leverage seems rather limited right now.

geocar 8y ago
The Cloud is similarly tricky: As we can factor our non-essential costs and push them to someone who can trade on their efficiency- there may still be competitors to Amazon, but monoculture is creating a strangling-effect there as well. I'm hoping that privacy and legislative effects will force companies to pull more things in-house so that they can provide controls and guarantees about their use. This can be good for software: If your medical data has to be on-prem, they have to build the right security controls to do so. If it can be in the Cloud, then they just need the security controls on paper. That creates a risk that maybe we can convince people to understand.
- matfil 8y ago
  I'm certainly with you on The Cloud. I've been expecting a backlash for a while, but not much sign of it so far. A big monthly bill from $CLOUD_VENDOR_OF_CHOICE seems to have become this century's equivalent of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM". Makes me think: a few years ago, there was some or other beer in the UK that was (heavily) advertised with the slogan "reassuringly expensive". The Cloud vendors (perhaps AWS in particular) seem to be going down that path a bit. Very interesting to juxtapose the reluctance to pay for software with an apparent eagerness to pay for Cloud services.
  - geocar 8y ago
    Stella! And then everyone started calling it "wife beater", because whilst it was slightly more expensive, it had a higher alcohol content. Weirdly I predict a similar fate: I expect some Cloud employee will walk off with some banks cloud-hosted server containing gobs of financial data (if it hasn't happened already) and that'll be the end of that. There'll probably be a rush of "security enhanced" cloud solutions after that, but it'll probably hurt them badly in the process.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  With language runtimes abstracting OS and hardware, the Cloud providers have become the new OSes, and coupled with the Web, we are back to the timesharing days, with the browser as a pretty VT100.

zeveb 8y ago

Nothing stops the others who are contributing to that consultant’s underlying free software from taking pride in their work. Nothing stops you from spending your bench time improving (or replacing!) that free software with others. Free Software is good for the users of software, which is ultimately good for developers, because ultimately we're all users of software first and developers second.

geocar 8y ago
Mine; yours, and everyones salary is based on the value our contribution brings to our customers needs. If we spend it making software, and we're competing with people working for free, we are simply not going to make as much money as we could be doing something else, so here's what happens: People who love writing software, who are basically willing to work for free, will continue to write software. Some of them are good, but most of them are not. People who are good at writing software, are also probably good at other things, and they will not program. We have a similar problem with teachers: Surely you have heard teachers get paid poorly! We could pay them more and attract smart good teachers, or the smart good people who could also teach will do something else. Free Software is still good, and I don't think it's useful to confuse the issue by pretending I'm saying otherwise.
- mistrial9 8y ago
  > Mine; yours, and everyones salary is based on the value our contribution brings to our customers needs. this is tragically naive ; the role of business management is to control and reduce price of inputs, every time. If something absolutely vital, essential, mission-critical can be obtained for less and less dollars out, it will be done. This is a prime "function of markets and competition" .. if you are talking about salt or eggs in a subsistance population, things can go well.. in a world-connected, skills-based post-industrial world, it results in exactly what you see .. millions of 20-somethings with more years of college and better health than their parents, struggling to break-even to just survive, etc. etc.
  - geocar 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago

I see the major culprints devs that want to get paid, while refusing wholeheartedly to pay in any form for the work of others. We see it all the time here, a forum supposedly for people doing their own business projects. A ShowHN of any commercial tool is followed by endless threads of commercial software is evil and free clones or partial implementations to avoid paying for such tool. So that leaves enterprise shops as the only customers to make money off selling tooling.

geocar 8y ago
This is definitely a big factor, but when did it occur? A long time ago I purchased Turbo C++, and then Watcom, but as soon as GCC got good enough I never paid for another compiler again. I would love to make a great compiler, but how could I afford to when I'm competing with free?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 8y ago
  GCC is a good example. Since we are talking about Smalltalk here. We had Energize C++, C++ Builder as C++ RAD tooling, which failed to win any representative market share. And if it wasn't for Apple sponsoring the initial work in clang, the open source C and C++ tooling would be much worse than what was achieved the last decade.
- xfer 8y ago
  Well, look at lispworks for example, that compiler costs $1500 for a hobbyist edition, i can't afford to pay for that. Maybe if you price your product reasonably for end users you can still sell software(including compilers/devtools), a lot of people pay for sublime text.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Sublime Text is a good example that always gets posts about devs not wanting to pay for a mere $80 for a perpetual license, valid across all supported OSes, in spite of making much more than that per hour in many world regions.

LfLxfxxLxfxx 8y ago

This argument assumes developers have access to the market. In reality most of us are not in a position to benefit directly from selling software, regardless of how "good" or "bad" it is. We can only sell our labour for a pre-negotiated salary to an employer who will then pocket the profits. In such an environment, sharing, taking pride in, and building upon each other's work makes a lot of sense and works in the developer's long-term interest (as well as your employer-du-jour's). Free software, just like proprietary, could be of good or bad quality. This depends on the people who wrote it, not so much on the choice of licensing terms. > It makes me sad that I can get paid so much more to not make software than I can get paid to make software. I can relate.