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Nothing signals to me that the market for high quality software is utterly and completely broken than this piece of news. Sad to hear this - if the Omni folks a

by dman 7y ago

Nothing signals to me that the market for high quality software is utterly and completely broken than this piece of news. Sad to hear this - if the Omni folks are having difficulty what hope do other small shops have. I am always amazed at the creativity SW folks show when coming up with reasons/excuses for not paying for tools - the culture around this is very saddening. On the other hand my friends who are into electrical, woodworking or automotive take a deep pride in the tools they own. Many of these fields pay a fraction of what SW dev does. I never fully understood why we do not have the "a good tool saves me x hours, and makes me happy while doing my work so I should pay for it" culture. SW engineers are pretty well paid and companies themselves have decent margins so this penny pinching tendency is upsetting.

ac29 7y ago
> I never fully understood why we do not have the "a good tool saves me x hours, and makes me happy while doing my work so I should pay for it" culture. SW engineers are pretty well paid and companies themselves have decent margins so this penny pinching tendency is upsetting. Don't we spend on software, though? Software spend is surely in the billions, if not tens or hundreds of billions a year. As consummate consumers of software, I'd think software engineers are more likely to spend money on software than the general public (and more likely to use open-source software as well).
- dman 7y ago
  Worth thinking about the number of companies globally that make a living writing software in the following categories of development tools a. Debuggers b. IDEs c. Querying Tools d. Text editors e. Source control tools f. Build systems The market for development tools does not look particularly vibrant based on the above.
  - leoedin 7y ago
    I work in the embedded space and so I have used a few proprietary debuggers/IDEs/build systems. They've still got a lot of market share. The huge problem with them is that they're proprietary. They don't have the wide usage of the open source equivalents, so debugging problems is hard. If you want to develop at home, at work and on a PC in a lab, you have to navigate licensing issues. If you want to do a build and test as part of your CI process, you have to navigate licensing issues. Then you move jobs and they've bought into a different, incompatible proprietary system and you have to learn it all over again. The open source options are actually good enough, and the advantage of being able to have the entire build system on a new computer after running a few apt-gets and downloading some free software is huge. The skills persist across jobs, I can use them at home for my own projects, I never have to worry about licenses expiring.
  - wslh 7y ago
    I have a company in this space and our software components and tools were more a marketing tool for our services than a product based business. Most often a customer buy a software component and require to build a product around it. Doing this we got customers like Trend Micro, Symantec, and Dell.
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    Most of these started off with proprietary options that people left. These tools often need to solve lots of little problems for lots of different people, and it's difficult for companies to keep up. But, these are all pretty easy to start for a single hacker who can recruit help to expand an open source version.
e40 7y ago
Took a meeting with a potential customer years ago. He was high on our technology and seemed certain to purchase. At our last lunch he told us their software company's CEO had a policy, they only used FOSS software. The irony of it hurt. Still does.
- dman 7y ago
  I have seen this myself - every software startup feels that everything they build upon must be a commodity and the only value add should happen at their layer.
- matharmin 7y ago
  At my company I take a very different view depending on where in the stack the tech is used: Developer tooling (Developer machines, IDE's, source control, CI, issue tracking, etc): Pay for the best. The product: Only use FOSS. Give back by contributing and by making some of our work available as FOSS. For the product, especially for the client-side, I just see it as too risky to include proprietary software. Even if the pricing is fine for right now, it can easily change later (got burned by both Google Maps and Mapbox years ago), and in some cases even prevent you from using different pricing models because of base costs it may add per user. On the infrastructure side I'm more flexible, but even there: 1. Stick to commoditized services as far as possible, where the pricing is predictable. I'd include most cloud services in this, and most "enterprise" offerings not. 2. Avoid hard vendor lock-in if feasible, but only up to a point (don't build something from scratch just to avoid the lock-in).
  - inapis 7y ago
    This is what everyone’s approach should be. The product itself should be standing on the shoulders of FOSS giants. Everything else is just quality-of-life improvements and tools which should be paid for if they speed up your productivity or decrease your mental load. Proprietary software lock-in in your product can generally be very damaging when things go wrong. I know of one company which was so throughly fucked over that they had to halt all feature development for 6 months while they were busy building a replacement. Cost them enough time and customers to a competitor. For non-product stuff, replacing proprietary software is a bitch but far less disrupting.
riffraff 7y ago
> On the other hand my friends who are into electrical, woodworking or automotive take a deep pride in the tools they own. I don't want to justify the "cheapness" of the software users, which is certainly excessive, but the feeling of ownership of a physical object is still very different from software. For example, you can easily lend your toolbox to a friend, your hammer won't ever stop functioning through no fault of your own, you can re-sell or gift a chainsaw if you want to get a new one. Since software is immaterial, we've ended up in a situation where these basic things don't work, people do not feel like they actually _own_ software, and thus feel less motivated to buy it.
- starsinspace 7y ago
  Maybe it was a mistake for the software industry to give up on the nice big colorful cardboard box with software inside it. Bought at a physical retail store, with CD-ROMs in it an a thick printed manual. Certainly gave more or a feeling of actually having bought something, different from just clicking a "buy" button in an appstore.
  - mehdix 7y ago
    Perhaps we should move from "buy the software" to "sponsor the developer" idea, such as what GitHub is doing with the "Sponsor" button.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      To first order, no one donates.
    - Ma8ee 7y ago
      We used to call that shareware.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Seems super wasteful packaging though? And I don't know about you but the first thing I do when I get a paper manual is go online to try to find a PDF version. Seems more like a downside than a value-add?
Angostura 7y ago
This is very sad. But I used to buy all the Omnigroup software until a couple of years ago, the prices went up a lot and I stopped.
- sjwright 7y ago
  Wow really? I remember looking at their prices 5–10 years ago and thinking they seemed a bit inflated.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    20 years ago.
- Compulsion 7y ago
  This story is more Omni slipping rather than the model failing universally. Personally, I own most of Omni's software, but I won't be upgrading to new versions when they come out. OmniFocus was once the cornerstone of my productivity. It was expensive and I didn't use the scripting aspects of it, but it provided value. The Apple ecosystem didn't bother me too much, but it was a pain, and I was doing more and more work on my Windows machine and going to my phone to add/update tasks was creating friction. They came out with OmniFocus web, which would allow me to solve the issue... but it's too damn expensive. I've already spent ~$175 for licenses to OmniFocus for Mac and iOS, now you're asking for $50/year on top of that. The competitors are hungry in this space, and Todoist offered more for less. I switched to their premium plan, which is cheaper than OmniFocus web itself, let alone the full subscription and includes clients for everything, plus a web-only client as a last resort. The same pattern holds true for the rest of their software lineup. I own most of it except OmniPlan. TL;DR. Omni isn't providing value compared to its (paid) competitors, to say nothing of FOSS.
  - 1123581321 7y ago
    I would have to make compromises to move my work over to Todoist from OmniFocus. It sounds like you were a bit of a light user whose situation got changed on him (Windows.) That’s fine but it doesn’t mean OmniFocus is behind its competitors.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
Omnigraffle is an essential tool for me. I couldn’t write my articles without it, and it’s the best visualizer I’ve ever used. I happily pay for it.
- veidr 7y ago
  Me too, that is an absolutely amazing tool! I have used it for years and years, for normal stuff like software diagrams and business process and shit like that, but also for stuff like floor-planning my house and doing mockups to decide what furniture and TVs to buy, to making easy-to-understand political comic books to influence how my friends vote (old example: https://masonmark.com/stuff/2008/America.pdf https://masonmark.com/stuff/2008/America.pdf), and I even used it to create the CV which helped land me the awesome job I have now (http://www.fivespeed.com/mason/resume/mason_resume.pdf http://www.fivespeed.com/mason/resume/mason_resume.pdf). According to rumor, the principal guy behind OmniGraffle had a fairly unusual employment arrangement and wasn't typically seen that often in the halls of Omni — I don't know the details, or even his name, but as an OmniGraffle-dependent user I'm wondering with some trepidation if he was part of these layoffs. https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle
linguae 7y ago
This reminds me a lot of presentation slides that I read a few nights ago. I was reading presentation slides from Carnegie Mellon professor Heather Miller about the funding challenges that open source software projects have (https://2019.programming-conference.org/details/programming-2019-Keynotes/1/Keynote-We-re-Building-On-Hollowed-Foundations-Worrying-Trends-in-Open-Source-and-W https://2019.programming-conference.org/details/programming-...). So many people and companies rely on open source infrastructure and productivity tools, and while there are plenty of people contributing to open source software in the terms of donations and development, there are key open source projects that aren't getting the support they need despite the wide usage and importance of those projects. I think one of the key challenges of this decade in the software industry is figuring out how the development and maintenance of high-quality software can be funded in sustainable ways. There is clearly a need for high-quality software that is not ad-supported, is not subscription-based, and does not monetize user data. However, the days of shrink-wrapped software and the shareware business model are over. If we want high-quality software, then we will need to come up with an answer to this problem.
- 7777fps 7y ago
  What's wrong with the subscription model? Vendors get recurring money and aren't incentivized to make sweeping changes to have major releases to get more money for the same product; consumers can manage cash flow by only paying while they need it, there is a lower barrier to purchase, and vendors have more predictable income.
  - mcgrath_sh 7y ago
    The mental overhead of renting every piece of software I own would be exhausting, not to mention consistently expensive. Subscriptions come out of a different part of the my budget than purchases do, and it is an ongoing expense I have to factor is versus coming out of my funds once every few years, if I can afford it at that time. There are several pieces of software I would have gladly bought at 2-3 times their annual subscription rate, but instead simply moved on from. I get it. Software developers need to be paid, but I’m not renting every tool I want to use. I also understand I’m in the minority because I understand why there is a new version every few years and would gladly purchase those. Simply put, the overhead and uncertainty of a subscription model devalues the vast majority of software for me to make me find alternatives.
new2628 7y ago
OK, I'll bite. I have a fundamental aversion to paying for something that has zero marginal cost. I feel I'm taken for a ride if I do so. If I pay for a book, I feel it cost some effort to produce it physically, print it, bind it, ship it. I cannot force myself to pay for an e-book, which is a pdf copied at no extra cost. Same for digital music and software or any other digital "good" or subscription. I sympathise with the creators, if they will produce something that does not scale, I will pay them for it. Otherwise, sorry, but not my job to figure out their business models.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  I also have that aversion. But regard, zero marginal cost doesn't mean 'zero cost'. There's overhead to amortize. Like, the effort to have a company that hosts that stuff. And the desire to run a for-profit company, else we'd all be at the mercy of volunteer organizations. They seem to have 'figured out' their business model already, and it involves each person copying the PDF, paying a nominal fee. FWIW
  - new2628 7y ago
    You make a good point of course -- my issue is that this amortization has become totally divorced from use. For example, a taxi driver also needs to amortize the upfront cost of their car, but the more they drive, the more the car wears down, so it is all predictable, and somehow feels "fair". With digital goods, you may sell it twice, or a billion times, what you earn is independent of how much cost you sunk into it (apart from hosting and other infrastructure as you mention) -- which explains the runaway successes of our times, but it's just something I am unwilling to participate in :)
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Yes it seems like new rules are needed for synthetic businesses of this sort. I've argued elsewhere on HN, that the reward for building an automated system should be, pay for building the system. In America at least, we consider the entire lifetime output of said system to belong to the builder. That is unsustainable. Imagine a future where everything is automated. There will be no need for workers, and not much further development. The economy becomes a static owner-vs-unemployed deal, and how can that survive?
snarf21 7y ago
I agree with your general point. We don't value time savings enough. However, I'd offer a few observations. A lathe does what a lathe does every time. Even if the company goes out of business, there will be parts available for it for a while. No one at the lathe company can decide that it will stop performing feature X because it isn't popular or make enough money. This leads into the second point. Companies (and individuals) have become fearful of external dependencies. So they push for FOSS so that they can avoid lock-in. Or they adopt an "invent here" mentality. Look at how many technology projects Google has cancelled despite the fact that they have infinite money.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Google doesn't have infinity software. They have X engineers and hiring more adds more complexity and doesn't lead to more useful software.
kevstev 7y ago
Dealing with paid software in corporate america is a terrible experience for all involved. As a user: I see some software I might be interested in trying. I have to go to generally some nameless, faceless group to get them to buy it. I open a ticket, or get an inquiry started, and they start asking boilerplate- do we have similar tools already, what is the license, etc. If we get past this phase, there is typically some kind of legal review. Maybe a few weeks later we can actually have this on our machine in some form. From a company perspective: A user wants to buy yet another piece of software that we have to manage and keep track of. We will have yearly contract renewals to deal with most likely, understanding and holding them to their support model, ensuring they don't phone home, ensuring we are in compliance with our number of licenses, etc- this is all quite a bit of continued work. Also- how do we package this software and get it out to our users- there is a process for that as well. With FOSS, we have none of these problems aside from the potential phone home problem, which isn't really a problem, because we restrict by default. It's just a much more pain-free process.
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  I don't doubt that any of this is true. But commercial software is the best way to ensure that everyone involved in developing the software is reliably compensated for the software itself (and not for some related service). The freeloader problem in open-source software is very real. If we want to make sure developers get paid, it has to be mandatory, and unfortunately that includes license enforcement and other things that we find unpleasant about commercial software.
philjohn 7y ago
Because free-to-use online tools like Draw.io are "good enough" for many people who would have previously stumped up for Omnigraffle for more basic needs. I also wonder if being MacOS/iOS only has hurt them, in the long run, more than they'd like to admit?
- wjdp 7y ago
  Our product team is mostly Mac, but avoid using Mac only software as they need to interop with people on other OSes, plus the lock-in factor.
zepto 7y ago
I was a delighted paying customer of OmniGraffle for a decade, and looked forward to each update. I also payed for multiple version on iPad. However at about the point that they released their own sync service, they just let it stagnate. There are so many ways the iOS and MacVersions could be more modern and more useful on a day to day level, none of which require a massive re-engineering effort. My conclusion is that they have just fallen behind the times.
0xff00ffee 7y ago
> this penny pinching tendency is upsetting. I think the word you are looking for is "greed".

by dman 7y ago

ac29 7y ago

> I never fully understood why we do not have the "a good tool saves me x hours, and makes me happy while doing my work so I should pay for it" culture. SW engineers are pretty well paid and companies themselves have decent margins so this penny pinching tendency is upsetting. Don't we spend on software, though? Software spend is surely in the billions, if not tens or hundreds of billions a year. As consummate consumers of software, I'd think software engineers are more likely to spend money on software than the general public (and more likely to use open-source software as well).

dman 7y ago
Worth thinking about the number of companies globally that make a living writing software in the following categories of development tools a. Debuggers b. IDEs c. Querying Tools d. Text editors e. Source control tools f. Build systems The market for development tools does not look particularly vibrant based on the above.
- leoedin 7y ago
  I work in the embedded space and so I have used a few proprietary debuggers/IDEs/build systems. They've still got a lot of market share. The huge problem with them is that they're proprietary. They don't have the wide usage of the open source equivalents, so debugging problems is hard. If you want to develop at home, at work and on a PC in a lab, you have to navigate licensing issues. If you want to do a build and test as part of your CI process, you have to navigate licensing issues. Then you move jobs and they've bought into a different, incompatible proprietary system and you have to learn it all over again. The open source options are actually good enough, and the advantage of being able to have the entire build system on a new computer after running a few apt-gets and downloading some free software is huge. The skills persist across jobs, I can use them at home for my own projects, I never have to worry about licenses expiring.
- wslh 7y ago
  I have a company in this space and our software components and tools were more a marketing tool for our services than a product based business. Most often a customer buy a software component and require to build a product around it. Doing this we got customers like Trend Micro, Symantec, and Dell.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Most of these started off with proprietary options that people left. These tools often need to solve lots of little problems for lots of different people, and it's difficult for companies to keep up. But, these are all pretty easy to start for a single hacker who can recruit help to expand an open source version.

e40 7y ago

Took a meeting with a potential customer years ago. He was high on our technology and seemed certain to purchase. At our last lunch he told us their software company's CEO had a policy, they only used FOSS software. The irony of it hurt. Still does.

dman 7y ago
I have seen this myself - every software startup feels that everything they build upon must be a commodity and the only value add should happen at their layer.
matharmin 7y ago
At my company I take a very different view depending on where in the stack the tech is used: Developer tooling (Developer machines, IDE's, source control, CI, issue tracking, etc): Pay for the best. The product: Only use FOSS. Give back by contributing and by making some of our work available as FOSS. For the product, especially for the client-side, I just see it as too risky to include proprietary software. Even if the pricing is fine for right now, it can easily change later (got burned by both Google Maps and Mapbox years ago), and in some cases even prevent you from using different pricing models because of base costs it may add per user. On the infrastructure side I'm more flexible, but even there: 1. Stick to commoditized services as far as possible, where the pricing is predictable. I'd include most cloud services in this, and most "enterprise" offerings not. 2. Avoid hard vendor lock-in if feasible, but only up to a point (don't build something from scratch just to avoid the lock-in).
- inapis 7y ago
  This is what everyone’s approach should be. The product itself should be standing on the shoulders of FOSS giants. Everything else is just quality-of-life improvements and tools which should be paid for if they speed up your productivity or decrease your mental load. Proprietary software lock-in in your product can generally be very damaging when things go wrong. I know of one company which was so throughly fucked over that they had to halt all feature development for 6 months while they were busy building a replacement. Cost them enough time and customers to a competitor. For non-product stuff, replacing proprietary software is a bitch but far less disrupting.

riffraff 7y ago

> On the other hand my friends who are into electrical, woodworking or automotive take a deep pride in the tools they own. I don't want to justify the "cheapness" of the software users, which is certainly excessive, but the feeling of ownership of a physical object is still very different from software. For example, you can easily lend your toolbox to a friend, your hammer won't ever stop functioning through no fault of your own, you can re-sell or gift a chainsaw if you want to get a new one. Since software is immaterial, we've ended up in a situation where these basic things don't work, people do not feel like they actually _own_ software, and thus feel less motivated to buy it.

starsinspace 7y ago
Maybe it was a mistake for the software industry to give up on the nice big colorful cardboard box with software inside it. Bought at a physical retail store, with CD-ROMs in it an a thick printed manual. Certainly gave more or a feeling of actually having bought something, different from just clicking a "buy" button in an appstore.
- mehdix 7y ago
  Perhaps we should move from "buy the software" to "sponsor the developer" idea, such as what GitHub is doing with the "Sponsor" button.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    To first order, no one donates.
  - Ma8ee 7y ago
    We used to call that shareware.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Seems super wasteful packaging though? And I don't know about you but the first thing I do when I get a paper manual is go online to try to find a PDF version. Seems more like a downside than a value-add?

Angostura 7y ago

This is very sad. But I used to buy all the Omnigroup software until a couple of years ago, the prices went up a lot and I stopped.

sjwright 7y ago
Wow really? I remember looking at their prices 5–10 years ago and thinking they seemed a bit inflated.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  20 years ago.
Compulsion 7y ago
This story is more Omni slipping rather than the model failing universally. Personally, I own most of Omni's software, but I won't be upgrading to new versions when they come out. OmniFocus was once the cornerstone of my productivity. It was expensive and I didn't use the scripting aspects of it, but it provided value. The Apple ecosystem didn't bother me too much, but it was a pain, and I was doing more and more work on my Windows machine and going to my phone to add/update tasks was creating friction. They came out with OmniFocus web, which would allow me to solve the issue... but it's too damn expensive. I've already spent ~$175 for licenses to OmniFocus for Mac and iOS, now you're asking for $50/year on top of that. The competitors are hungry in this space, and Todoist offered more for less. I switched to their premium plan, which is cheaper than OmniFocus web itself, let alone the full subscription and includes clients for everything, plus a web-only client as a last resort. The same pattern holds true for the rest of their software lineup. I own most of it except OmniPlan. TL;DR. Omni isn't providing value compared to its (paid) competitors, to say nothing of FOSS.
- 1123581321 7y ago
  I would have to make compromises to move my work over to Todoist from OmniFocus. It sounds like you were a bit of a light user whose situation got changed on him (Windows.) That’s fine but it doesn’t mean OmniFocus is behind its competitors.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

Omnigraffle is an essential tool for me. I couldn’t write my articles without it, and it’s the best visualizer I’ve ever used. I happily pay for it.

veidr 7y ago
Me too, that is an absolutely amazing tool! I have used it for years and years, for normal stuff like software diagrams and business process and shit like that, but also for stuff like floor-planning my house and doing mockups to decide what furniture and TVs to buy, to making easy-to-understand political comic books to influence how my friends vote (old example: https://masonmark.com/stuff/2008/America.pdf https://masonmark.com/stuff/2008/America.pdf), and I even used it to create the CV which helped land me the awesome job I have now (http://www.fivespeed.com/mason/resume/mason_resume.pdf http://www.fivespeed.com/mason/resume/mason_resume.pdf). According to rumor, the principal guy behind OmniGraffle had a fairly unusual employment arrangement and wasn't typically seen that often in the halls of Omni — I don't know the details, or even his name, but as an OmniGraffle-dependent user I'm wondering with some trepidation if he was part of these layoffs. https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle

linguae 7y ago

This reminds me a lot of presentation slides that I read a few nights ago. I was reading presentation slides from Carnegie Mellon professor Heather Miller about the funding challenges that open source software projects have (https://2019.programming-conference.org/details/programming-2019-Keynotes/1/Keynote-We-re-Building-On-Hollowed-Foundations-Worrying-Trends-in-Open-Source-and-W https://2019.programming-conference.org/details/programming-...). So many people and companies rely on open source infrastructure and productivity tools, and while there are plenty of people contributing to open source software in the terms of donations and development, there are key open source projects that aren't getting the support they need despite the wide usage and importance of those projects. I think one of the key challenges of this decade in the software industry is figuring out how the development and maintenance of high-quality software can be funded in sustainable ways. There is clearly a need for high-quality software that is not ad-supported, is not subscription-based, and does not monetize user data. However, the days of shrink-wrapped software and the shareware business model are over. If we want high-quality software, then we will need to come up with an answer to this problem.

7777fps 7y ago
What's wrong with the subscription model? Vendors get recurring money and aren't incentivized to make sweeping changes to have major releases to get more money for the same product; consumers can manage cash flow by only paying while they need it, there is a lower barrier to purchase, and vendors have more predictable income.
- mcgrath_sh 7y ago
  The mental overhead of renting every piece of software I own would be exhausting, not to mention consistently expensive. Subscriptions come out of a different part of the my budget than purchases do, and it is an ongoing expense I have to factor is versus coming out of my funds once every few years, if I can afford it at that time. There are several pieces of software I would have gladly bought at 2-3 times their annual subscription rate, but instead simply moved on from. I get it. Software developers need to be paid, but I’m not renting every tool I want to use. I also understand I’m in the minority because I understand why there is a new version every few years and would gladly purchase those. Simply put, the overhead and uncertainty of a subscription model devalues the vast majority of software for me to make me find alternatives.

new2628 7y ago

OK, I'll bite. I have a fundamental aversion to paying for something that has zero marginal cost. I feel I'm taken for a ride if I do so. If I pay for a book, I feel it cost some effort to produce it physically, print it, bind it, ship it. I cannot force myself to pay for an e-book, which is a pdf copied at no extra cost. Same for digital music and software or any other digital "good" or subscription. I sympathise with the creators, if they will produce something that does not scale, I will pay them for it. Otherwise, sorry, but not my job to figure out their business models.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
I also have that aversion. But regard, zero marginal cost doesn't mean 'zero cost'. There's overhead to amortize. Like, the effort to have a company that hosts that stuff. And the desire to run a for-profit company, else we'd all be at the mercy of volunteer organizations. They seem to have 'figured out' their business model already, and it involves each person copying the PDF, paying a nominal fee. FWIW
- new2628 7y ago
  You make a good point of course -- my issue is that this amortization has become totally divorced from use. For example, a taxi driver also needs to amortize the upfront cost of their car, but the more they drive, the more the car wears down, so it is all predictable, and somehow feels "fair". With digital goods, you may sell it twice, or a billion times, what you earn is independent of how much cost you sunk into it (apart from hosting and other infrastructure as you mention) -- which explains the runaway successes of our times, but it's just something I am unwilling to participate in :)
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Yes it seems like new rules are needed for synthetic businesses of this sort. I've argued elsewhere on HN, that the reward for building an automated system should be, pay for building the system. In America at least, we consider the entire lifetime output of said system to belong to the builder. That is unsustainable. Imagine a future where everything is automated. There will be no need for workers, and not much further development. The economy becomes a static owner-vs-unemployed deal, and how can that survive?

snarf21 7y ago

I agree with your general point. We don't value time savings enough. However, I'd offer a few observations. A lathe does what a lathe does every time. Even if the company goes out of business, there will be parts available for it for a while. No one at the lathe company can decide that it will stop performing feature X because it isn't popular or make enough money. This leads into the second point. Companies (and individuals) have become fearful of external dependencies. So they push for FOSS so that they can avoid lock-in. Or they adopt an "invent here" mentality. Look at how many technology projects Google has cancelled despite the fact that they have infinite money.

lonelappde 7y ago
Google doesn't have infinity software. They have X engineers and hiring more adds more complexity and doesn't lead to more useful software.

kevstev 7y ago

Dealing with paid software in corporate america is a terrible experience for all involved. As a user: I see some software I might be interested in trying. I have to go to generally some nameless, faceless group to get them to buy it. I open a ticket, or get an inquiry started, and they start asking boilerplate- do we have similar tools already, what is the license, etc. If we get past this phase, there is typically some kind of legal review. Maybe a few weeks later we can actually have this on our machine in some form. From a company perspective: A user wants to buy yet another piece of software that we have to manage and keep track of. We will have yearly contract renewals to deal with most likely, understanding and holding them to their support model, ensuring they don't phone home, ensuring we are in compliance with our number of licenses, etc- this is all quite a bit of continued work. Also- how do we package this software and get it out to our users- there is a process for that as well. With FOSS, we have none of these problems aside from the potential phone home problem, which isn't really a problem, because we restrict by default. It's just a much more pain-free process.

mwcampbell 7y ago
I don't doubt that any of this is true. But commercial software is the best way to ensure that everyone involved in developing the software is reliably compensated for the software itself (and not for some related service). The freeloader problem in open-source software is very real. If we want to make sure developers get paid, it has to be mandatory, and unfortunately that includes license enforcement and other things that we find unpleasant about commercial software.

philjohn 7y ago

Because free-to-use online tools like Draw.io are "good enough" for many people who would have previously stumped up for Omnigraffle for more basic needs. I also wonder if being MacOS/iOS only has hurt them, in the long run, more than they'd like to admit?

wjdp 7y ago
Our product team is mostly Mac, but avoid using Mac only software as they need to interop with people on other OSes, plus the lock-in factor.

zepto 7y ago

I was a delighted paying customer of OmniGraffle for a decade, and looked forward to each update. I also payed for multiple version on iPad. However at about the point that they released their own sync service, they just let it stagnate. There are so many ways the iOS and MacVersions could be more modern and more useful on a day to day level, none of which require a massive re-engineering effort. My conclusion is that they have just fallen behind the times.

0xff00ffee 7y ago

> this penny pinching tendency is upsetting. I think the word you are looking for is "greed".