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It quasi surprises how pro-piracy hacker news is, probably in large part due to need to minimize their own guilt from their own piracy. Maybe there is a sociali

It quasi surprises how pro-piracy hacker news is, probably in large part due to need to minimize their own guilt from their own piracy. Maybe there is a socialist bent with the belief that if there was no money novelists and artisan software craftsmen could produce for the love of it. It seems that only SaaS products are acceptable but then hackernews also hates subscriptions...

xhkkffbf 4y ago
Some people will reflexively mod down anything that's pro-artist or pro-writer. They continue to embrace the idea that somehow piracy is somehow a good thing when it's pretty easy to see how it hurts.
cronix 4y ago
Many of us probably actually discovered what we wanted to do for a living by being able to use all sorts of software that was way more expensive than we could afford as a teen, which eventually led to buying the software. I am thoroughly against pirating things you are making money off of, but more lenient on personal use/exploration/learning. If there was something akin to a public library full of the worlds commercial software for people to discover, explore and play with, I would have done that as that's where I was getting most of the books from that I was using to learn all of this complex software, like the $18,000 Alias|Wavefront 3D software, back then.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  I totally get it, it’s a market segmentation problem where pirated software serves the bottom end of the market. If companies officially offered such discount prices then they’d be pressured by their regular customers for the same price. Segmenting based on willing to risk pirate software is a convenient workaround. Personally I’m still clinging on to old versions of perpetually licensed software. It makes little sense for me to pay a yearly subscription for something I use a few days a year. I’d much rather a day rate or hourly as I do a wide variety of things but only one thing at a time.
- FormFollowsFunc 4y ago
  Some companies provide free non-commercial versions for learning e.g. Houdini and Nuke. I wish more companies would do it.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    Hell, Davinci gives away their video editor application Resolve Free for commercial use. They're able to do that because they money off of hardware sales and getting editors into their ecosystem is worth more than a software license would be. (They do also sell a pro/Studio version of their software.) A lot of high end software does have an education discount version if you're affiliated with a local college or university.
guidoism 4y ago
> novelists and artisan software craftsmen could produce for the love of it People probably won't build some dashboard for a large boring corporation but they absolutely will do it for something they love. This isn't even theoretical. See how much software and programming research exists completely outside of the market. And for writing, take a look at fan fiction or stuff on writing subreddits. Certainly some people do it for money, but there still is a significant number of people who do it for the love of it.
vidarh 4y ago
A lot of things are indeed desirable enough to produce that many of us keep producing them even without much in the way of economic incentives. As someone firmly in the hobby segment when it comes to writing (my two self-published novels has sold more than average yet still won't cover my - admittedly ridiculous - takeaway spend) the money doesn't matter to me, and so I've probably given away as many copies as I've sold. The problem I have with this support of piracy myself, is that while there'd be millions of books still being published without noteworthy economic incentives, economic incentives matters to get volume and quality from at least a proportion of those producing creative works full time who we'd really like to be able to dedicate their time fully to it. In other words: Even if (and that's purely for the sake of argument) I had the talent to produce something of similar quality as cstross, talent is not enough. It also takes a huge amount of time and dedication to polish those skills to get to the that level, and very few people who are doing it as a hobby can ever hope to (and/or want to) put in the level of effort needed. I certainly could never do that. If we could achieve the same with grants or something like UBI, great, but I feel we'd lose a great amount of of creative works if it wasn't possible for a proportion of people to work full time honing those skills. And many of those works would be among our best.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  My dad wrote a book. It sold reasonably well as an academic book, but his hourly pay for it probably was in the single digits of pennies. He knew this in advance, and wrote the book as a prestige thing.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    For non-fiction I think that is often the most viable way of getting a return on the time spent. I've not published any non-fiction in print, but even my (old... time to write some again) blog posts have more than once gotten people to put aside coding tests and/or fast-track me through interview processes, so the prestige is certainly a good point.
WalterBright 4y ago
The D language, that I work on, is given away entirely for free. It has the most permissive license I can find (Boost). I don't get paid for contributing to D. The same goes for most contributors to D. (A handful get paid via sponsors.) If you're familiar with my posts, I'm about as far from a socialist as one can get.

xhkkffbf 4y ago

Some people will reflexively mod down anything that's pro-artist or pro-writer. They continue to embrace the idea that somehow piracy is somehow a good thing when it's pretty easy to see how it hurts.

cronix 4y ago

Many of us probably actually discovered what we wanted to do for a living by being able to use all sorts of software that was way more expensive than we could afford as a teen, which eventually led to buying the software. I am thoroughly against pirating things you are making money off of, but more lenient on personal use/exploration/learning. If there was something akin to a public library full of the worlds commercial software for people to discover, explore and play with, I would have done that as that's where I was getting most of the books from that I was using to learn all of this complex software, like the $18,000 Alias|Wavefront 3D software, back then.

cjbgkagh 4y ago
I totally get it, it’s a market segmentation problem where pirated software serves the bottom end of the market. If companies officially offered such discount prices then they’d be pressured by their regular customers for the same price. Segmenting based on willing to risk pirate software is a convenient workaround. Personally I’m still clinging on to old versions of perpetually licensed software. It makes little sense for me to pay a yearly subscription for something I use a few days a year. I’d much rather a day rate or hourly as I do a wide variety of things but only one thing at a time.
FormFollowsFunc 4y ago
Some companies provide free non-commercial versions for learning e.g. Houdini and Nuke. I wish more companies would do it.
- zamnos 4y ago
  Hell, Davinci gives away their video editor application Resolve Free for commercial use. They're able to do that because they money off of hardware sales and getting editors into their ecosystem is worth more than a software license would be. (They do also sell a pro/Studio version of their software.) A lot of high end software does have an education discount version if you're affiliated with a local college or university.

guidoism 4y ago

> novelists and artisan software craftsmen could produce for the love of it People probably won't build some dashboard for a large boring corporation but they absolutely will do it for something they love. This isn't even theoretical. See how much software and programming research exists completely outside of the market. And for writing, take a look at fan fiction or stuff on writing subreddits. Certainly some people do it for money, but there still is a significant number of people who do it for the love of it.

vidarh 4y ago

A lot of things are indeed desirable enough to produce that many of us keep producing them even without much in the way of economic incentives. As someone firmly in the hobby segment when it comes to writing (my two self-published novels has sold more than average yet still won't cover my - admittedly ridiculous - takeaway spend) the money doesn't matter to me, and so I've probably given away as many copies as I've sold. The problem I have with this support of piracy myself, is that while there'd be millions of books still being published without noteworthy economic incentives, economic incentives matters to get volume and quality from at least a proportion of those producing creative works full time who we'd really like to be able to dedicate their time fully to it. In other words: Even if (and that's purely for the sake of argument) I had the talent to produce something of similar quality as cstross, talent is not enough. It also takes a huge amount of time and dedication to polish those skills to get to the that level, and very few people who are doing it as a hobby can ever hope to (and/or want to) put in the level of effort needed. I certainly could never do that. If we could achieve the same with grants or something like UBI, great, but I feel we'd lose a great amount of of creative works if it wasn't possible for a proportion of people to work full time honing those skills. And many of those works would be among our best.

WalterBright 4y ago
My dad wrote a book. It sold reasonably well as an academic book, but his hourly pay for it probably was in the single digits of pennies. He knew this in advance, and wrote the book as a prestige thing.
- vidarh 4y ago
  For non-fiction I think that is often the most viable way of getting a return on the time spent. I've not published any non-fiction in print, but even my (old... time to write some again) blog posts have more than once gotten people to put aside coding tests and/or fast-track me through interview processes, so the prestige is certainly a good point.

WalterBright 4y ago

The D language, that I work on, is given away entirely for free. It has the most permissive license I can find (Boost). I don't get paid for contributing to D. The same goes for most contributors to D. (A handful get paid via sponsors.) If you're familiar with my posts, I'm about as far from a socialist as one can get.