3 ms·
> Perhaps some of them will be inspired push the envelope and contribute their research back to the commons instead of guarding it in order to collect rent. I
by wilg 4y ago
> Perhaps some of them will be inspired push the envelope and contribute their research back to the commons instead of guarding it in order to collect rent.
I swear to god, this website is so infuriating.
If you would like to learn more about this topic you can look at Steve Yedlin’s discussion of the matter https://www.yedlin.net/index.html https://www.yedlin.net/index.html or look at some of the technical documents linked from our website.
- motoxpro 4y agoDon't you know? You should work for free and give it away for free and if it doesn't work the way I want you should fix it for free. But also I have a job at a company that sells software that also pays me and you should pay them for it, or at least visit the site so they can sell ads.
- version_five 4y ago> I swear to god, this website is so infuriating I posted elsewhere that I thought this would be cooler if it was open source. My comment fell flat and was modded down a lot, I felt a little bad about it. Now I see this and I'm glad I posted. You post an ad for your paid software, in Show HN, then you get upset when people point out open source alternatives and criticize you for your business model. OK
- wilg 4y agoI’m not upset that someone points out open source alternatives! But I do think your don’t have a criticism of our business model, but business models in general, which is silly and off-topic.
- qotgalaxy 4y ago[dead]
- marcjuul 4y agoIs is, in fact, neither silly nor off-topic to discuss the politics, economics or ethics of the product being advertised. The fact that this makes you uncomfortable or annoyed is disturbing. As you well know there are plenty of different business models available that do not keep code secret and proprietary but even if it was a criticism of "business models in general" it still would be neither silly nor off-topic to discuss this in the comments. This reads like an attempt to silence discussion of perceived problems with our society and how they relate to innovation and software development in the context of your product and makes both you and your company look bad.
- wilg 4y agoJesus christ, man. We just spent a lot of time, money, and labor to make a software product and I posted it to Hacker News on a lark. It really sucks to have a bunch of people complain that we are asking people to pay for our work. We even have a free (as in beer) version you can use to make non-commercial projects! We are hardly the first company to sell software, nor post about it on this website. Proprietary software is ethical. Responding to your post is not "an attempt to silence discussion of perceived problems with our society". Such nonsense!
- thot_experiment 4y ago> Proprietary software is ethical. I don't believe this is true. I can't square creating something that can be duplicated essentially for free to provide value to people with denying that value to people in order to enrich myself.
- wilg 4y agoWould you say selling movies, books, music, art, or games is unethical also?
- thot_experiment 4y agoDigital copies, yes, I would. I also take issue with the practice of software as a service specifically, and while I see that you provide a perpetual license, without pro-rating monthly payments toward a perpetual license you're creating a psychologically abusive system to extract value from people with that model same as most SaaS. I'm not sure what you're doing is bad on net, probably the world is better off for the solution you've developed despite the aspects of it that I find problematic. I understand how hard it is to make "good" choices with regard to this stuff on a personal level, and I place most of the blame on the systems that surround us. I think the ideas/memes I'm sharing/championing here are deeply important to the continued freedom/growth of the human race in concert with computers. I'm not trying to be mean to you or put down your product or belittle your effort. I understand probably deeper than most what it takes to do this and what you have done is impressive. That doesn't make it right. I don't have the answers, I'm not even trying to tell you "stop selling your shit and open source it immediately". I live in the real world too. I'm very worried that most people are not even thinking about the questions/implications of artificial scarcity and how tacitly okay we are with it as a society, that's why I'm so loud about this.
- girvo 4y ago> criticize you for your business model Hardly a criticism, more just a complaint about capitalism in general it seems. Which I don't expect a software shop to be the ones to solve...
- tombert 4y agoDidn't you hear? If an open source version of a thing exists, they have a permanent monopoly on that thing in perpetuity, and you should never be allowed to charge for anything remotely similar. Famously, both macOS and Windows stopped existing after Linux was released. I sadly don't do anything with video editing anymore, and $129 per quarter to play with is a bit rich for me as a result, but I think what you're doing is pretty cool! I have always loved the "film look", and have found a lot of (though not all of) the film filters in the past to have a sort of "artificial" look to them. This one looks decidedly better.
- wilg 4y agoFeel free to play with our free Filmbox Lite version!
- superdude 4y agoThis is why I hardly visit this place and will never post a personal project or anything I'm working on. Because people will just complain about it if it costs money, or smugly brag that they could have created the same thing in a weekend. Regardless, this looks like a very cool plugin and I look forward to playing around with the lite version. Thanks for sharing.
- kuschku 4y agoEvery time I see a project that's paid where people comment "I could create the same in a weekend", that's exactly what I do. By now most of the apps I'm using daily are written by me. It's (a) fun, and (b) gives me the satisfaction not to pay for something that's not worth it. For open-core projects, I usually just fork and rebuild all the paid features ontop of the free version. That's actually surprisingly easy most of the time. (Obviously I then release everything I create under GPL, so others can use it freely and expand on it)