3 ms·

I'm very interested in how the business side will work out. On the one hand, it's very fair to make some money when you make something great (and it funds ongoi

by 6ren 15y ago

I'm very interested in how the business side will work out. On the one hand, it's very fair to make some money when you make something great (and it funds ongoing creation). On the other hand, dev tools are expected to be free and it feeds massive adoption (and if not free, devs have the ability reverse engineer e.g. linux and gcc). The common wisdom is that smalltalk got killed by high prices. There are exceptions: MS VS; some editors. Maybe the older, broader the appeal, and closer to the dev, the greater the pressure for free - so that new, specialized, and close-to-customer tools resist commoditization. Light table is new, but general and close to dev. The Street_Performer_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system#Street_Performer_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system#Street_... fits perfectly with KS. But personally, I love the idea of making something great and getting rewarded in proportion to its greatness (as in product sales), not a fixed reward. An ideal solution seems to be to charge large customers (e.g. over 10 employees? Over 100?), but I've not seen this explicitly attempted... but I guess it's achieved by "enterprise" versions, with extra features, particularly those needed only by large customers... that may be what is being considered with "some plugins may remain closed source". Then one could create a marketplace for plugins, an app store etc.

quanticle 15y ago
Even Microsoft Visual Studio isn't that expensive. Microsoft created it's Express Editions partly as a response to the fact that institutions were choosing Linux for introduction to programming, because of the plethora of free tools available. And even before Visual Studio had free versions, Microsoft was rumored to be turning a blind eye towards piracy of Visual Studio, so that programmer who used a (pirated) copy of Visual Studio at home would ask for a (legitimate) copy of it at work.
- zerohp 15y ago
  My gut feeling is that Microsoft has turned a blind eye toward piracy by individuals for many years. Almost everyone I know who began doing system administration during the late 90's learned NT4 by pirating it.
  - guelo 15y ago
    In a way it's a smart way to differentiate customers. Since the pirates also add value to the platform you don't want to lose them, but you also want to extract the money you can from those willing to pay. By demonizing pirates while allowing the pirate channel to exist they are able to do both.
  - zokier 15y ago
    Another similar case: Photoshop.
    - 89a 15y ago
      Which actually became easier to pirate in the later versions
- T-Winsnes 15y ago
  Microsoft have been giving free versions of their professional range to students for several years with the Dreamspark program :) https://www.dreamspark.com https://www.dreamspark.com
  - rplnt 15y ago
    Also MSDN Academic Alliance. Almost every MS product except Office is there for students, for free. That includes Visual Studio, all Windows version starting at 98 (including Server editions), XNA, and much more. Edit: Now I see that it's probably the same thing. I'll leavy my comment here though, if anyone else was familiar with MSDNAA.
6ren 15y ago
On the mailing list, it's planned as a local server + browser http://groups.google.com/group/light-table/browse_thread/thread/a4430ad1696b596e http://groups.google.com/group/light-table/browse_thread/thr... I was thinking a webapp version would be easy to monetize (monthly), but it only makes sense when you have to store data - which I now realize could be the code itself. :) A front-end for developing hosted projects. It could be sold to amazon AWS, heroku, google apps, IBM/Oracle etc; and perhaps to github, bitbucket, dropbox when they start hosting apps - or start a new dev cloud. (of course, still provide the local server version). Maybe problems with network latency + javascript performance... but might work for some divisions of labour, on some platforms (e.g. iPad). Network latency is worth it, if the result is faster than a local server could do... and if roundtrip + server was 100-200ms, that feels pretty much instant. If your app is remotely hosted, the main benefit is orthogonal, being convenient access (100% portable dev environment) - so, as JS and networks improve, it becomes more compelling. Test and integration servers can also be remotely hosted - no need to edit the live app. (This approach, like vim-editing remote files, has appealed to me for a long time).

by 6ren 15y ago

quanticle 15y ago

Even Microsoft Visual Studio isn't that expensive. Microsoft created it's Express Editions partly as a response to the fact that institutions were choosing Linux for introduction to programming, because of the plethora of free tools available. And even before Visual Studio had free versions, Microsoft was rumored to be turning a blind eye towards piracy of Visual Studio, so that programmer who used a (pirated) copy of Visual Studio at home would ask for a (legitimate) copy of it at work.

zerohp 15y ago
My gut feeling is that Microsoft has turned a blind eye toward piracy by individuals for many years. Almost everyone I know who began doing system administration during the late 90's learned NT4 by pirating it.
- guelo 15y ago
  In a way it's a smart way to differentiate customers. Since the pirates also add value to the platform you don't want to lose them, but you also want to extract the money you can from those willing to pay. By demonizing pirates while allowing the pirate channel to exist they are able to do both.
- zokier 15y ago
  Another similar case: Photoshop.
  - 89a 15y ago
    Which actually became easier to pirate in the later versions
T-Winsnes 15y ago
Microsoft have been giving free versions of their professional range to students for several years with the Dreamspark program :) https://www.dreamspark.com https://www.dreamspark.com
- rplnt 15y ago
  Also MSDN Academic Alliance. Almost every MS product except Office is there for students, for free. That includes Visual Studio, all Windows version starting at 98 (including Server editions), XNA, and much more. Edit: Now I see that it's probably the same thing. I'll leavy my comment here though, if anyone else was familiar with MSDNAA.

6ren 15y ago

On the mailing list, it's planned as a local server + browser http://groups.google.com/group/light-table/browse_thread/thread/a4430ad1696b596e http://groups.google.com/group/light-table/browse_thread/thr... I was thinking a webapp version would be easy to monetize (monthly), but it only makes sense when you have to store data - which I now realize could be the code itself. :) A front-end for developing hosted projects. It could be sold to amazon AWS, heroku, google apps, IBM/Oracle etc; and perhaps to github, bitbucket, dropbox when they start hosting apps - or start a new dev cloud. (of course, still provide the local server version). Maybe problems with network latency + javascript performance... but might work for some divisions of labour, on some platforms (e.g. iPad). Network latency is worth it, if the result is faster than a local server could do... and if roundtrip + server was 100-200ms, that feels pretty much instant. If your app is remotely hosted, the main benefit is orthogonal, being convenient access (100% portable dev environment) - so, as JS and networks improve, it becomes more compelling. Test and integration servers can also be remotely hosted - no need to edit the live app. (This approach, like vim-editing remote files, has appealed to me for a long time).