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> A service has constant administration costs which are paid by the service provider. A properly designed library instead moves these costs to the users of the

> A service has constant administration costs which are paid by the service provider. A properly designed library instead moves these costs to the users of the library. I agree with the articles point, but this introduction, right there, is why it's not happening. SaaS turns your startup into a unicorn and yourself into a rich person. Or at least that's what you are hoping/aiming for. A library is not going to make you a billionaire. Sad but reality.

veenusav 6y ago
It is a reality. Another point is that piece of code does not mean everything. When it run on an optimised platform, it will give much value. For example, a multi-core algorithm. When it is a service, that can be ensured. Also, the Library and the beneficiary application run on same memory space (normally). So the lib code can cause crashes or can hack privacy. Another thing is your secret-sauce is public now. So it can be copied or reverse engineered.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bogdanoff_2 6y ago
Is SaaS really the only viable (or "unicorn") business model? Do people not sell software licenses anymore? (In theory nothing prevents you from making your license require recurring payment as well)
- tobmlt 6y ago
  *Most who sell licenses seem to be moving their old stuff/cash-cow-behemoths/etc to saas as quickly (slowly) as possible. -certainly there are exceptions. Exceptions seem more likely with smaller older companies with different priorities.
- indigochill 6y ago
  I suspect it's the same reason game devs are hot for streaming. When the code only runs on machines you control, piracy becomes impossible. By contrast, trusting people to respect licenses on code on their computers is how piracy happens. In my opinion this is a feature, not a bug, but the business reason is clear for why all commercial software is moving towards the SaaS model.
  - pault 6y ago
    How much game piracy happens these days? Since steam became such a good distribution platform and my internet connection got fast I haven’t even thought about pirating a game. AAA titles are expensive, but there aren’t a ton of them released every year, and downloading cracked installers is a huge security risk.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Recurring revenue is much more stable than license purchases and also less prone to piracy. Adobe's incredibly successful transition (from a share price perspective) is a testament to the value ascribed to recurring revenue models. In fact, companies that sell services with a recurring revenue component are generally seen as higher margin and more stable across industries. For instance, Aerospace & Defense companies that have a strong "Aftermarket" presence (which really means maintenance, spares, repairs, etc.) generally command higher valuations. The SaaS hype just takes this to the ultimate level. Digital services have very little costs (relative to their physical counterparts). Recurring digital revenue equates to mind-boggling numbers like Salesforce having >70% gross margins, which is probably the most prominent reason why Tech valuations have skyrocketed in the cloud era
  - eru 6y ago
    In general I agree with you. However: > For instance, Aerospace & Defense companies that have a strong "Aftermarket" presence (which really means maintenance, spares, repairs, etc.) generally command higher valuations. Not sure whether that's a good example, because that might just be exploiting some weirdness in how government projects get funding approval, and might not be relevant to the wider (and software) world?
    - airstrike 6y ago
      A&D encompasses Commercial aerospace like OEMs and their suppliers which are unrelated to Defense spending. Another example are Automotive companies like heavy-duty vehicle parts manufacturers, which also benefit from higher Aftermarket exposure
      - eru 6y ago
        Yes, that's a better example! (I thought your initial point was good, just that the argument for it wasn't as strong as it could be.)
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Been a while since I saw a license without recurring payment, particularly for code components. B2B, all libraries I've dealt with were paid per-developer-seat-year.
pjmlp 6y ago
Only on the FOSS world, because it is the only way to force devs to pay. There is another alternative universe where commercial software, including libraries, gets sold.
- the_local_host 6y ago
  > Only on the FOSS world, because it is the only way to force devs to pay. What about the approach that the Qt library uses, where they have a free GPL version and a paid commercial license? People might pay to avoid GPL obligations while using the library.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    A nitpick, but that's not true of Qt any more. You can use the latest Qt under the LGPL3 licence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    A good one, yet go check the crowd with pitchforks and torches heading to Qt castle.
    - johannes1234321 6y ago
      For the ones missing the context: The Qt Company recently changed their publishing model and they provide only recent versions as (L)GPL. Thus Open source users have to migrate to Qt 6 or run an outdated version of 5.7, missing bugfix releases. Migrating to Qt 6 however isn't easy as some components aren't available for Qt 6, yet. Thus Open Source users requiring those modules can't go anywhere. Aside from that the Qt company restricted access to their builds behind a registration wall. And if you are willing to pay they created a pricing model, which isn't easy to understand and can become quite expensive, (233$/month/developer) and as it's a subscription you can't simply pay a license and go from there, but you have to subscribe and the moment you terminate the agreement you are forbidden from distributing your application any further with Qt. Thus unhappy open source users and many users who at least claim they would like to buy for sensible cost, but can't afford.
jasode 6y ago
>SaaS turns your startup into a unicorn and yourself into a rich person. Or at least that's what you are hoping/aiming for. A library is not going to make you a billionaire. The article's author seems to be making an indirect reference to Moxie Marlinspike (Signal) "ecosystem is moving" essay[0]. If so, Moxie Marlinspike's method for becoming a billionaire by creating non-profit 501(c)(3) organization and providing Signal's source code is a very strange way to cash out of a unicorn. And btw... even though users/developers have the Signal source[1] which enables them to create an alternate chat universe that's not dependent on Signal's official service/servers, that isn't good enough. They still want to federate[2] with Moxie's servers. This aspect isn't addressed by op's (catern) article. In other words, having a library (or even the full client+server source code) doesn't really solve the users end needs. It turns out that many place more importance on the service than the library. [0] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ [1] https://github.com/signalapp https://github.com/signalapp [2] https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco... [3] my comments about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 EDIT to reply: The first IKEA business in 1943 was for-profit. The non-profit foundation (Stichting Ingka Foundation) was formed later in 1982 so the owner could take advantage of tax efficiencies. I don't see how IKEA's opposite timeline has any relevance to Marlin's playbook to become a billionaire. Is there a real case study of a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity tricking everyone into a bait & switch and minting a new billionaire?
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > If so, Moxie Marlinspike's method for becoming a billionaire by creating non-profit 501(c)(3) organization and providing Signal's source code is a very strange way to cash out of a unicorn. On the contrary: Step 1: The service is already centralized Step 2: Make the central service closed source: happening now. Step 3: A no profit can be turned for-profit or used together with a for-profit (e.g. IKEA) Signal can become a perfect example of bait-and-switch market capture.
Peteris 6y ago
One of the reasons smart contracts work so well is that they retain some of the properties of libraries yet are monetizable.
kybernetikos 6y ago
You're right. The fact that people can make outsize rewards from subscription services are the reason that even small single use tools are now 'services'. I have a piece of software that removes the background from my video feed. It's a subscription, and it regularly phones home. I have a piece of software that lets me visually combine, rotate and reorder pdfs. It's a subscription. Even the simplest things, like a 'torch' are ad-supported on android these days. It's miserable fighting off a million people who want to help me for 'less than the daily price of your coffee'. And that's ignoring the fact that so many of these subscriptions are really quite expensive - they adopt the standard cloud pricing of 9.99 per month, even when the service they're offering is not much difference than what a $5 piece of shareware would have provided in the distant past.
- devit 6y ago
  Pretty sure there is normal software for those uses, and you can get free/open source apps with no ads from F-Droid for all basic needs (such as a "torch").
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Unfortunately, normal software cannot afford the marketing budget a service can (particularly a VC-backed service).
    - bcrosby95 6y ago
      There's gotta be a way to crowd source this. Like a subreddit for people interested in apps/software that isn't subscription based.
      - sofixa 6y ago
        Like r/selfhosted?
    - cratermoon 6y ago
      There's a bible app called YouVersion that's by far the most popular app on both iOS and Android. "YouVersion Bible is notorious for privacy violations and dangerous data collection. Yet, here it is: still seated firmly in the Play Store, racking up over 100 million installs with a whopping 22 permission requests." https://www.cnet.com/news/why-so-many-android-christian-apps-have-unholy-privacy-policies/ https://www.cnet.com/news/why-so-many-android-christian-apps... They company owns the bible.com domain. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. billionaire founder/owner David Green as supported it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/09/18/david-green-the-biblical-billionaire-backing-the-evangelical-movement/?sh=55f585845807 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/09/18/david-g...
dragonwriter 6y ago
> SaaS turns your startup into a unicorn and yourself into a rich person If the function could be served by a library? Probably not. Because someone else will write the library, and then your high-latency, internet-required, for-pay service will be competing against a free (presuming the library is available that way, which if the first one isn't is still likely eventually), low-latency, offline-capable library.
rock_hard 6y ago
Democratizing making software comes at a price Now everybody can and is trying to make a living off of it
- andrewnicolalde 6y ago
  Is that such a bad thing?
  - rock_hard 6y ago
    Absolutely not! But OP seems to think so
suyash 6y ago
wrong, you can have both, several successful open source projects have libraries that are released under friendly open source license. SaaS comes in to provide added benefits over DIY approach, both realities can happily exist and in fact open source growth drives SaaS business models.
- pojzon 6y ago
  And if companies like Amazon can turn them into a SaaS they immediately do so.
yonaguska 6y ago
It still applies for internal usage. You can have 18 microservices, but if you're strict about versioning and start treating them like libraries when possible, you're going to save yourself a lot of headache.
javajosh 6y ago
Great comment about SaaS, ganafagol. It's running software that you make money from, not code. Code is just the leverage you have over changing the running software. The running service itself is the ultimate "concrete object" that, for generations, software has been moving away from. There has never been a "compute fabric" as robust as the modern cloud, so long-lived mutable data-structures are becoming more common, and will be even more so. (We try to have our cake and eat it too in an iterated game where the unit of deployment is immutable and reproducible. That game is called devops and more specifically, continuous delivery.)
weaksauce 6y ago
there is also the fact that companies might see a smaller operating expenditure vs a larger capital expenditure as a benefit as well. depends on the situation of the company but it could be an easier sell.
amelius 6y ago
Don't worry. If the functionality is useful, then eventually there will be a free open source library that will prevent the original author from becoming a billionaire.
max_ 6y ago
Not every one is a rational agent looking to maximize their earnings, some devs have soul in the game.
hyperpallium2 6y ago
A closed platform could charge developers for library usage. (Similar to same-cloud services). I imagined this dystopian future 20 years ago, but it hasn't happened yet.
groaner 6y ago
It doesn't even take oodles of money from a SaaS platform to motivate turning a library into a service. Even in in-house development, developers are often motivated to build services and have internal customers take dependencies on them so that they can expand influence and demonstrate ownership in a way that gets noticed by senior leadership and put them in line for promo. It also opens up the possibility for stakeholders to build their own little fiefdoms with access controls, intake processes, and a justifiable source of funding. Can't do that with a library.
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  That seems like an overly cynical explanation. There are many reasons why you would want a service instead of a library: 1. Even if the service is just a CRUD API, then you can isolate the storage layer from external users. If you just a have a library then every application needs to be able to connect to the DB. 2. You can protect mission critical resources through rate-limiting in a way that is way harder with a library. 3. Even if those are not problems, if someone has a DB connection then there is nothing really stopping them from just going around your library entirely. So random service X gets popped by an attacker. Now they can execute arbitrary queries against your DB. With a service they are still constrained to the operations exposed through the API. 4. You have a lot more freedom to change internal implementation details for a service. Need to change your DB schema (or migrate between postgres and mysql) then you can hide that behind the service interface. If you have a library out there then you have limited control over when people take version updates and it is virtually impossible to synchronize the update across all consumer of said library.
  - groaner 6y ago
    You've just described requirements that belong to a service. Congratulations, you made the right (obvious) decision. I'm talking about writing entire services that are just wrappers around ffmpeg, pdf2html, parquet-tools, Olson tzdata, or a 10-parameter logistic regression. No stateful behavior, storage, or authoritative source of truth involved. The worst case I've seen was a service that just enumerates a bunch of values of constants (that actually never change). There may have been some future-proofing in mind at the time, but more likely it was a solution in search of a problem.
sam0x17 6y ago
> I agree with the articles point, but this introduction, right there, is why it's not happening The flipside of it is, X open source library existing is why a lot of STARTUPS aren't happening ;)
ThinkBeat 6y ago
Not really. It is a possibility that could happen, but it is not very probable. I am certain taht millions of services are written and dies in lonely obscurity. According to a Hulu documentary I watched recently some woman makes over 150K a month from OnlyFans. Lots of people want that and sign up and the vast majority will not make anything. Or the more classic moving to Hollywood to become a famous actor making $$$$, or be a rock star. The chances your services will make billions is slim, If you write a good library, you can sell it. I would much rather buy a library than a service. (I may be in the minority for sure). If you give it away, and if it does prove highly popular then wrapping it in a service and offering it that way will create some income. With that strategy you can iterate over functionality and find out what the market wants the most and create a product that is more mature as a service.
Thorentis 6y ago
I detest that people have accepted this business model as being the norm. I think the bar has been lowered drastically in terms of what people are willing to pay for. If somebody launched Notepad as a Service with premium backgrounds instead of that boring, conventional white color, then you'd probably find enough people willing to pay $9.99/month for it. It's just absurd.

veenusav 6y ago

It is a reality. Another point is that piece of code does not mean everything. When it run on an optimised platform, it will give much value. For example, a multi-core algorithm. When it is a service, that can be ensured. Also, the Library and the beneficiary application run on same memory space (normally). So the lib code can cause crashes or can hack privacy. Another thing is your secret-sauce is public now. So it can be copied or reverse engineered.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bogdanoff_2 6y ago

Is SaaS really the only viable (or "unicorn") business model? Do people not sell software licenses anymore? (In theory nothing prevents you from making your license require recurring payment as well)

tobmlt 6y ago
*Most who sell licenses seem to be moving their old stuff/cash-cow-behemoths/etc to saas as quickly (slowly) as possible. -certainly there are exceptions. Exceptions seem more likely with smaller older companies with different priorities.
indigochill 6y ago
I suspect it's the same reason game devs are hot for streaming. When the code only runs on machines you control, piracy becomes impossible. By contrast, trusting people to respect licenses on code on their computers is how piracy happens. In my opinion this is a feature, not a bug, but the business reason is clear for why all commercial software is moving towards the SaaS model.
- pault 6y ago
  How much game piracy happens these days? Since steam became such a good distribution platform and my internet connection got fast I haven’t even thought about pirating a game. AAA titles are expensive, but there aren’t a ton of them released every year, and downloading cracked installers is a huge security risk.
airstrike 6y ago
Recurring revenue is much more stable than license purchases and also less prone to piracy. Adobe's incredibly successful transition (from a share price perspective) is a testament to the value ascribed to recurring revenue models. In fact, companies that sell services with a recurring revenue component are generally seen as higher margin and more stable across industries. For instance, Aerospace & Defense companies that have a strong "Aftermarket" presence (which really means maintenance, spares, repairs, etc.) generally command higher valuations. The SaaS hype just takes this to the ultimate level. Digital services have very little costs (relative to their physical counterparts). Recurring digital revenue equates to mind-boggling numbers like Salesforce having >70% gross margins, which is probably the most prominent reason why Tech valuations have skyrocketed in the cloud era
- eru 6y ago
  In general I agree with you. However: > For instance, Aerospace & Defense companies that have a strong "Aftermarket" presence (which really means maintenance, spares, repairs, etc.) generally command higher valuations. Not sure whether that's a good example, because that might just be exploiting some weirdness in how government projects get funding approval, and might not be relevant to the wider (and software) world?
  - airstrike 6y ago
    A&D encompasses Commercial aerospace like OEMs and their suppliers which are unrelated to Defense spending. Another example are Automotive companies like heavy-duty vehicle parts manufacturers, which also benefit from higher Aftermarket exposure
    - eru 6y ago
      Yes, that's a better example! (I thought your initial point was good, just that the argument for it wasn't as strong as it could be.)
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Been a while since I saw a license without recurring payment, particularly for code components. B2B, all libraries I've dealt with were paid per-developer-seat-year.

pjmlp 6y ago

Only on the FOSS world, because it is the only way to force devs to pay. There is another alternative universe where commercial software, including libraries, gets sold.

the_local_host 6y ago
> Only on the FOSS world, because it is the only way to force devs to pay. What about the approach that the Qt library uses, where they have a free GPL version and a paid commercial license? People might pay to avoid GPL obligations while using the library.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  A nitpick, but that's not true of Qt any more. You can use the latest Qt under the LGPL3 licence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)
- pjmlp 6y ago
  A good one, yet go check the crowd with pitchforks and torches heading to Qt castle.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    For the ones missing the context: The Qt Company recently changed their publishing model and they provide only recent versions as (L)GPL. Thus Open source users have to migrate to Qt 6 or run an outdated version of 5.7, missing bugfix releases. Migrating to Qt 6 however isn't easy as some components aren't available for Qt 6, yet. Thus Open Source users requiring those modules can't go anywhere. Aside from that the Qt company restricted access to their builds behind a registration wall. And if you are willing to pay they created a pricing model, which isn't easy to understand and can become quite expensive, (233$/month/developer) and as it's a subscription you can't simply pay a license and go from there, but you have to subscribe and the moment you terminate the agreement you are forbidden from distributing your application any further with Qt. Thus unhappy open source users and many users who at least claim they would like to buy for sensible cost, but can't afford.

jasode 6y ago

>SaaS turns your startup into a unicorn and yourself into a rich person. Or at least that's what you are hoping/aiming for. A library is not going to make you a billionaire. The article's author seems to be making an indirect reference to Moxie Marlinspike (Signal) "ecosystem is moving" essay[0]. If so, Moxie Marlinspike's method for becoming a billionaire by creating non-profit 501(c)(3) organization and providing Signal's source code is a very strange way to cash out of a unicorn. And btw... even though users/developers have the Signal source[1] which enables them to create an alternate chat universe that's not dependent on Signal's official service/servers, that isn't good enough. They still want to federate[2] with Moxie's servers. This aspect isn't addressed by op's (catern) article. In other words, having a library (or even the full client+server source code) doesn't really solve the users end needs. It turns out that many place more importance on the service than the library. [0] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ [1] https://github.com/signalapp https://github.com/signalapp [2] https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco... [3] my comments about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499 EDIT to reply: The first IKEA business in 1943 was for-profit. The non-profit foundation (Stichting Ingka Foundation) was formed later in 1982 so the owner could take advantage of tax efficiencies. I don't see how IKEA's opposite timeline has any relevance to Marlin's playbook to become a billionaire. Is there a real case study of a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity tricking everyone into a bait & switch and minting a new billionaire?

eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> If so, Moxie Marlinspike's method for becoming a billionaire by creating non-profit 501(c)(3) organization and providing Signal's source code is a very strange way to cash out of a unicorn. On the contrary: Step 1: The service is already centralized Step 2: Make the central service closed source: happening now. Step 3: A no profit can be turned for-profit or used together with a for-profit (e.g. IKEA) Signal can become a perfect example of bait-and-switch market capture.

Peteris 6y ago

One of the reasons smart contracts work so well is that they retain some of the properties of libraries yet are monetizable.

kybernetikos 6y ago

You're right. The fact that people can make outsize rewards from subscription services are the reason that even small single use tools are now 'services'. I have a piece of software that removes the background from my video feed. It's a subscription, and it regularly phones home. I have a piece of software that lets me visually combine, rotate and reorder pdfs. It's a subscription. Even the simplest things, like a 'torch' are ad-supported on android these days. It's miserable fighting off a million people who want to help me for 'less than the daily price of your coffee'. And that's ignoring the fact that so many of these subscriptions are really quite expensive - they adopt the standard cloud pricing of 9.99 per month, even when the service they're offering is not much difference than what a $5 piece of shareware would have provided in the distant past.

devit 6y ago
Pretty sure there is normal software for those uses, and you can get free/open source apps with no ads from F-Droid for all basic needs (such as a "torch").
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Unfortunately, normal software cannot afford the marketing budget a service can (particularly a VC-backed service).
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    There's gotta be a way to crowd source this. Like a subreddit for people interested in apps/software that isn't subscription based.
    - sofixa 6y ago
      Like r/selfhosted?
  - cratermoon 6y ago
    There's a bible app called YouVersion that's by far the most popular app on both iOS and Android. "YouVersion Bible is notorious for privacy violations and dangerous data collection. Yet, here it is: still seated firmly in the Play Store, racking up over 100 million installs with a whopping 22 permission requests." https://www.cnet.com/news/why-so-many-android-christian-apps-have-unholy-privacy-policies/ https://www.cnet.com/news/why-so-many-android-christian-apps... They company owns the bible.com domain. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. billionaire founder/owner David Green as supported it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/09/18/david-green-the-biblical-billionaire-backing-the-evangelical-movement/?sh=55f585845807 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/09/18/david-g...

dragonwriter 6y ago

> SaaS turns your startup into a unicorn and yourself into a rich person If the function could be served by a library? Probably not. Because someone else will write the library, and then your high-latency, internet-required, for-pay service will be competing against a free (presuming the library is available that way, which if the first one isn't is still likely eventually), low-latency, offline-capable library.

rock_hard 6y ago

Democratizing making software comes at a price Now everybody can and is trying to make a living off of it

andrewnicolalde 6y ago
Is that such a bad thing?
- rock_hard 6y ago
  Absolutely not! But OP seems to think so

suyash 6y ago

wrong, you can have both, several successful open source projects have libraries that are released under friendly open source license. SaaS comes in to provide added benefits over DIY approach, both realities can happily exist and in fact open source growth drives SaaS business models.

pojzon 6y ago
And if companies like Amazon can turn them into a SaaS they immediately do so.

yonaguska 6y ago

It still applies for internal usage. You can have 18 microservices, but if you're strict about versioning and start treating them like libraries when possible, you're going to save yourself a lot of headache.

javajosh 6y ago

Great comment about SaaS, ganafagol. It's running software that you make money from, not code. Code is just the leverage you have over changing the running software. The running service itself is the ultimate "concrete object" that, for generations, software has been moving away from. There has never been a "compute fabric" as robust as the modern cloud, so long-lived mutable data-structures are becoming more common, and will be even more so. (We try to have our cake and eat it too in an iterated game where the unit of deployment is immutable and reproducible. That game is called devops and more specifically, continuous delivery.)

weaksauce 6y ago

there is also the fact that companies might see a smaller operating expenditure vs a larger capital expenditure as a benefit as well. depends on the situation of the company but it could be an easier sell.

amelius 6y ago

Don't worry. If the functionality is useful, then eventually there will be a free open source library that will prevent the original author from becoming a billionaire.

max_ 6y ago

Not every one is a rational agent looking to maximize their earnings, some devs have soul in the game.

hyperpallium2 6y ago

A closed platform could charge developers for library usage. (Similar to same-cloud services). I imagined this dystopian future 20 years ago, but it hasn't happened yet.

groaner 6y ago

It doesn't even take oodles of money from a SaaS platform to motivate turning a library into a service. Even in in-house development, developers are often motivated to build services and have internal customers take dependencies on them so that they can expand influence and demonstrate ownership in a way that gets noticed by senior leadership and put them in line for promo. It also opens up the possibility for stakeholders to build their own little fiefdoms with access controls, intake processes, and a justifiable source of funding. Can't do that with a library.

thinkharderdev 6y ago
That seems like an overly cynical explanation. There are many reasons why you would want a service instead of a library: 1. Even if the service is just a CRUD API, then you can isolate the storage layer from external users. If you just a have a library then every application needs to be able to connect to the DB. 2. You can protect mission critical resources through rate-limiting in a way that is way harder with a library. 3. Even if those are not problems, if someone has a DB connection then there is nothing really stopping them from just going around your library entirely. So random service X gets popped by an attacker. Now they can execute arbitrary queries against your DB. With a service they are still constrained to the operations exposed through the API. 4. You have a lot more freedom to change internal implementation details for a service. Need to change your DB schema (or migrate between postgres and mysql) then you can hide that behind the service interface. If you have a library out there then you have limited control over when people take version updates and it is virtually impossible to synchronize the update across all consumer of said library.
- groaner 6y ago
  You've just described requirements that belong to a service. Congratulations, you made the right (obvious) decision. I'm talking about writing entire services that are just wrappers around ffmpeg, pdf2html, parquet-tools, Olson tzdata, or a 10-parameter logistic regression. No stateful behavior, storage, or authoritative source of truth involved. The worst case I've seen was a service that just enumerates a bunch of values of constants (that actually never change). There may have been some future-proofing in mind at the time, but more likely it was a solution in search of a problem.

sam0x17 6y ago

> I agree with the articles point, but this introduction, right there, is why it's not happening The flipside of it is, X open source library existing is why a lot of STARTUPS aren't happening ;)

ThinkBeat 6y ago

Not really. It is a possibility that could happen, but it is not very probable. I am certain taht millions of services are written and dies in lonely obscurity. According to a Hulu documentary I watched recently some woman makes over 150K a month from OnlyFans. Lots of people want that and sign up and the vast majority will not make anything. Or the more classic moving to Hollywood to become a famous actor making $$$$, or be a rock star. The chances your services will make billions is slim, If you write a good library, you can sell it. I would much rather buy a library than a service. (I may be in the minority for sure). If you give it away, and if it does prove highly popular then wrapping it in a service and offering it that way will create some income. With that strategy you can iterate over functionality and find out what the market wants the most and create a product that is more mature as a service.

Thorentis 6y ago

I detest that people have accepted this business model as being the norm. I think the bar has been lowered drastically in terms of what people are willing to pay for. If somebody launched Notepad as a Service with premium backgrounds instead of that boring, conventional white color, then you'd probably find enough people willing to pay $9.99/month for it. It's just absurd.