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I liked this article, because (1) it's well-written and detailed, and (2) I somehow disagree with it in my gut, though I'm not sure precisely why. So, it makes

I liked this article, because (1) it's well-written and detailed, and (2) I somehow disagree with it in my gut, though I'm not sure precisely why. So, it makes me think — another plus. I suppose the thing that bothers me is the general sense that it is advocating for "non owned" software — let someone else handle the support, etc. Makes sense from a business perspective, of course. But I suppose the thing I don't like about such "non-owned" software is its tendency to mutate in ways I don't like, outside of my control. Eg: perhaps a feature I like is removed, with no genuine alternative. Maybe I am a niche user of that feature, so the business is (understandably) focusing on their "core" product, and my pleas to the contrary don't really move the needle. Basically, while I agree with the point that ownership is more expensive than it seems on the surface, I'd also like recognition that non-ownership is also more expensive than it seems on the surface, just in a different way. Agreed overall about the various gradations of ownership available today, and it's worth thinking about the pros and cons all the way along the spectrum.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
The app that I just released is pretty much 99% Me-made. I wrote multiple backend servers, as well as the native frontend. I use two fairly small third-party dependencies (A Big JSON parser on the server, and a keychain wrapper on the frontend), and a whole lot of dependencies that I wrote. Most folks, hereabouts, would sniff at it, and tell me how "out of touch" I am. Guilty as charged, I guess, but my work seems to come out pretty well, and I enjoy doing it. I love crafting software, as opposed to writing software.
jerbear4328 3y ago
Very well put, I agree. Maybe I'm too idealistic, but I want to make my stuff work my way, with nobody else's potentially-conflicting motives or possibility to just disappear involved. That is definitely more work, and a bad idea for a business, but for personal stuff that's what I want. > You can kick around purely metaphysical notions of “ownership” to your heart’s content. I guess what ownership means to me is, in the worst case scenario, if everyone else involved disappears, I still have possession of my stuff. If this open source project dies, I can fork it and maintain it myself, or pay someone else to. Compare that with some SaaS product, the company might just disappear one day and all of my stuff is gone with no recourse.
PaulKeeble 3y ago
I feel similar. I know this is right, businesses ultimately pay for the support and need it and products go out of date for marketing and sales reasons and its easier and better for all involved to have a continuous rolling service. I still feel like the people at homes however don't really want this all the time. The games industry is definitely a mix of the two models but very often its priced up front and right now all the services come to an end regardless as customers leave for new games. The business focussed applications have gone this way and a got amount of the other home applications are free open source. So I agree its happened but I don't think the consumer gets the best deal out of this in a lot of cases because something they learnt to use and have an amount of content in ends up slowly moving out of date or costing a lot to keep due to the service costs. So because of this people have been pushed towards open source applications, which don't always survive but once at a certain size do so better than businesses on smaller numbers of customers. What bugs me is we have quite substantial amounts of performance available on the desktop and we don't utilise it because of the business model. Machines mostly just run web browsers and a lot of people have abandoned having a computer/laptop for a phone because there isn't much on the PC they care about especially with consoles being an easier route to gaming. Its a popular platform still, there are a lot of PCs and yet very few applications that really utilise the performance available and yet plenty of cloud services that do which they have to pay monthly for. There is a market not being catered to.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking of games too, where open source is still extremely uncommon. I guess that this supports the article's argument as a counter-example : unless this is a game that you are exceptionally fond of, you are not going to care about its maintenance.
denebula 3y ago
The article is a rather hot take in today's climate. Not only that, but leads out with the most flimsy observation of laws around selling homes. What?? Anyways, moving to saas is like the west outsourcing all manufacturing. The skillsets go away and don't usually come back easily.
tomxor 3y ago
> software is its tendency to mutate in ways I don't like, outside of my control. Totally this. I'm actually migrating my org away from gitlab to self hosted gitea for this reason. We are all pretty fed up of the UI changing all the time, the UX complexity, and constantly being pushed towards CI features we have no interest in or need for. I don't particularly like the look of what's been happening on github either. Gitea - even on a frickin nanode - is way faster and more responsive than our paid gitlab service. The only tricky part is reorganising a large number of hierarchical groups to the more flat organisation of gitea. Once you are already running a bunch of infrastructure, one more server is nothing. I've also found it much easier to take on new services once I moved my backup strategy to ZFS, where the entire backup is at the storage layer and databases no longer need special treatment beyond tuning for an atomic file system.
mdasen 3y ago
Having read this and a bunch of the replies, maybe I can point to a bit of the reason we kinda disagree with our gut. Often times, we see vendors that seem wasteful, that are overcharging, have a product that's average at best, or trying to get an extra 20% from their business model. We know it can be done better. This article stands up and says "no, you just need it done." I think that goes against what so many of us feel and do in our lives. No, you don't need to read a dozen reviews of TVs, just go to the BestBuy and get yourself a standard TV, and it doesn't even matter if you end up spending $300 more on it. All that time you're reading reviews and comparing stuff is costing you way more. Yes, Slack feels like a lot of money for just a chat program, but the company just wants that done rather than you spending a couple weeks installing Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip, figuring out how to make them high availability and backed up and everything, and making a comparison to present to people. They just want a chat program that they don't have to think about and the $15 or whatever per employee is pennies compared to those employees salaries (or even the office space they're sitting in). I think our guts disagree with it because it's an article that kinda tells us to ignore what could be better when it isn't really the point of your business. Further, it kinda tells us that we can't do it better. This is probably the thing that would get under our skin the most. We're the kinds of people that like building things and here the author is saying that all these bespoke things end up as a hodgepodge of barnacles that don't even get the business pointed in the right direction. The author is, to an extent, saying that the business is better off when employees adapt themselves to standard things rather than using custom tools. To an extent, it's questioning whether we should be writing so much software. Is what so many software engineers are creating even valuable? Or are the costs much higher than the value being created on these bespoke systems? I don't think the author is trying to question our profession, but there's certainly a question of whether we're reinventing the wheel too much and spending our time on less useful pursuits within our profession (and let's face it, reinventing the wheel is so much fun). Software is hard. People often say that the last 10% takes 90% of the time. I think we often underestimate the costs (in time and money) that go into actually getting something into production and then maintaining it. The author is basically telling us: it'll take longer than you think, it won't be as good as you dream, cruft will accumulate over time, and at the end of the day the company just wants it done, not for you to have a project. But we like building things.
roenxi 3y ago
It is a bit more than a tendency; the article in question is promising to mutate it in ways you don't like. > The UI feels increasingly dated and clunky by modern standards, and the team increasingly hates using it, especially the new hires. It needs a UI refresh. The odds are something like 1:20 that this is a change current users appreciate. Anyone talking about interfaces being "dated" is a risk to users.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Software is such a large field, with so many contexts, that it's hard to make generalised statements that cover even a few situations. Thus the endless discussions of software model - all of which no doubt work for some set of users. Some software is free, some costs hundreds of thousands a year. Some runs on specific hardware some is general. Some works in the cloud, on prem, or on desktop. Some comes with source, some doesn't. Some is very niche, some is ubiquitous. Ultimately each author, user, and customer, needs to understand their goals, and the goals of the market, and if they pick a business model that intersects those goals they have a chance at success. Techies might like to "own" the in-house software. (So the open source model suits them.) But most business people just want their accounts program to just work. They don't want to tinker with the code, they don't want responsibility for supporting it, they just want it to work. For a successful business money is easy to get. People with the ability to hack on some custom build of some random open source thing are hard to get. Better to use QuickBooks, and pay an annual license. For a startup business with no revenue, it makes sense to leverage skills, and look after cash. So get free software to do everything. Make do with what you get, and spend some (cheap) time keeping it going. I could go on, but you get the idea. There are a million contexts, and each one has a different view of time, cash, revenue, ability, desire, market and so on. Which is why sweeping generalisations of "the right way" are clearly not ubiquitous when we look at the world around us.
  - pixelfarmer 3y ago
    We will run into all sorts of issues. For example, there are already subscription models for cars. Want a seat heating? Nice! US$9.99 per month, only! Chips can be printed on flexible plastics for years, but we are approaching sizes now that makes it potentially possible to include this into all sorts of things. With very low power this opens up all sorts of "invisible" ways to power them, and guess what? They run software. Now imagine these software pieces running a subscription model. And our lives are increasingly infiltrated with all sorts of such tech, unseen, and this subscription model path is a very slippery slope towards hell. I should also note here that there are huge differences between for example paying for "service" (but you do own the stuff), and this "cloud SaaS" approach that is often taken, where you own exactly nothing. Former is ok, a fair deal I would say, latter is a bane to our society. Keep in mind that the more our world depends on such things, the more these things become infrastructure, and infrastructure has some added requirements most of these services don't and won't fulfill.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

The app that I just released is pretty much 99% Me-made. I wrote multiple backend servers, as well as the native frontend. I use two fairly small third-party dependencies (A Big JSON parser on the server, and a keychain wrapper on the frontend), and a whole lot of dependencies that I wrote. Most folks, hereabouts, would sniff at it, and tell me how "out of touch" I am. Guilty as charged, I guess, but my work seems to come out pretty well, and I enjoy doing it. I love crafting software, as opposed to writing software.

jerbear4328 3y ago

Very well put, I agree. Maybe I'm too idealistic, but I want to make my stuff work my way, with nobody else's potentially-conflicting motives or possibility to just disappear involved. That is definitely more work, and a bad idea for a business, but for personal stuff that's what I want. > You can kick around purely metaphysical notions of “ownership” to your heart’s content. I guess what ownership means to me is, in the worst case scenario, if everyone else involved disappears, I still have possession of my stuff. If this open source project dies, I can fork it and maintain it myself, or pay someone else to. Compare that with some SaaS product, the company might just disappear one day and all of my stuff is gone with no recourse.

PaulKeeble 3y ago

I feel similar. I know this is right, businesses ultimately pay for the support and need it and products go out of date for marketing and sales reasons and its easier and better for all involved to have a continuous rolling service. I still feel like the people at homes however don't really want this all the time. The games industry is definitely a mix of the two models but very often its priced up front and right now all the services come to an end regardless as customers leave for new games. The business focussed applications have gone this way and a got amount of the other home applications are free open source. So I agree its happened but I don't think the consumer gets the best deal out of this in a lot of cases because something they learnt to use and have an amount of content in ends up slowly moving out of date or costing a lot to keep due to the service costs. So because of this people have been pushed towards open source applications, which don't always survive but once at a certain size do so better than businesses on smaller numbers of customers. What bugs me is we have quite substantial amounts of performance available on the desktop and we don't utilise it because of the business model. Machines mostly just run web browsers and a lot of people have abandoned having a computer/laptop for a phone because there isn't much on the PC they care about especially with consoles being an easier route to gaming. Its a popular platform still, there are a lot of PCs and yet very few applications that really utilise the performance available and yet plenty of cloud services that do which they have to pay monthly for. There is a market not being catered to.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
Yeah, I was thinking of games too, where open source is still extremely uncommon. I guess that this supports the article's argument as a counter-example : unless this is a game that you are exceptionally fond of, you are not going to care about its maintenance.

denebula 3y ago

The article is a rather hot take in today's climate. Not only that, but leads out with the most flimsy observation of laws around selling homes. What?? Anyways, moving to saas is like the west outsourcing all manufacturing. The skillsets go away and don't usually come back easily.

tomxor 3y ago

> software is its tendency to mutate in ways I don't like, outside of my control. Totally this. I'm actually migrating my org away from gitlab to self hosted gitea for this reason. We are all pretty fed up of the UI changing all the time, the UX complexity, and constantly being pushed towards CI features we have no interest in or need for. I don't particularly like the look of what's been happening on github either. Gitea - even on a frickin nanode - is way faster and more responsive than our paid gitlab service. The only tricky part is reorganising a large number of hierarchical groups to the more flat organisation of gitea. Once you are already running a bunch of infrastructure, one more server is nothing. I've also found it much easier to take on new services once I moved my backup strategy to ZFS, where the entire backup is at the storage layer and databases no longer need special treatment beyond tuning for an atomic file system.

mdasen 3y ago

Having read this and a bunch of the replies, maybe I can point to a bit of the reason we kinda disagree with our gut. Often times, we see vendors that seem wasteful, that are overcharging, have a product that's average at best, or trying to get an extra 20% from their business model. We know it can be done better. This article stands up and says "no, you just need it done." I think that goes against what so many of us feel and do in our lives. No, you don't need to read a dozen reviews of TVs, just go to the BestBuy and get yourself a standard TV, and it doesn't even matter if you end up spending $300 more on it. All that time you're reading reviews and comparing stuff is costing you way more. Yes, Slack feels like a lot of money for just a chat program, but the company just wants that done rather than you spending a couple weeks installing Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip, figuring out how to make them high availability and backed up and everything, and making a comparison to present to people. They just want a chat program that they don't have to think about and the $15 or whatever per employee is pennies compared to those employees salaries (or even the office space they're sitting in). I think our guts disagree with it because it's an article that kinda tells us to ignore what could be better when it isn't really the point of your business. Further, it kinda tells us that we can't do it better. This is probably the thing that would get under our skin the most. We're the kinds of people that like building things and here the author is saying that all these bespoke things end up as a hodgepodge of barnacles that don't even get the business pointed in the right direction. The author is, to an extent, saying that the business is better off when employees adapt themselves to standard things rather than using custom tools. To an extent, it's questioning whether we should be writing so much software. Is what so many software engineers are creating even valuable? Or are the costs much higher than the value being created on these bespoke systems? I don't think the author is trying to question our profession, but there's certainly a question of whether we're reinventing the wheel too much and spending our time on less useful pursuits within our profession (and let's face it, reinventing the wheel is so much fun). Software is hard. People often say that the last 10% takes 90% of the time. I think we often underestimate the costs (in time and money) that go into actually getting something into production and then maintaining it. The author is basically telling us: it'll take longer than you think, it won't be as good as you dream, cruft will accumulate over time, and at the end of the day the company just wants it done, not for you to have a project. But we like building things.

roenxi 3y ago

It is a bit more than a tendency; the article in question is promising to mutate it in ways you don't like. > The UI feels increasingly dated and clunky by modern standards, and the team increasingly hates using it, especially the new hires. It needs a UI refresh. The odds are something like 1:20 that this is a change current users appreciate. Anyone talking about interfaces being "dated" is a risk to users.

bruce511 3y ago
Software is such a large field, with so many contexts, that it's hard to make generalised statements that cover even a few situations. Thus the endless discussions of software model - all of which no doubt work for some set of users. Some software is free, some costs hundreds of thousands a year. Some runs on specific hardware some is general. Some works in the cloud, on prem, or on desktop. Some comes with source, some doesn't. Some is very niche, some is ubiquitous. Ultimately each author, user, and customer, needs to understand their goals, and the goals of the market, and if they pick a business model that intersects those goals they have a chance at success. Techies might like to "own" the in-house software. (So the open source model suits them.) But most business people just want their accounts program to just work. They don't want to tinker with the code, they don't want responsibility for supporting it, they just want it to work. For a successful business money is easy to get. People with the ability to hack on some custom build of some random open source thing are hard to get. Better to use QuickBooks, and pay an annual license. For a startup business with no revenue, it makes sense to leverage skills, and look after cash. So get free software to do everything. Make do with what you get, and spend some (cheap) time keeping it going. I could go on, but you get the idea. There are a million contexts, and each one has a different view of time, cash, revenue, ability, desire, market and so on. Which is why sweeping generalisations of "the right way" are clearly not ubiquitous when we look at the world around us.
- pixelfarmer 3y ago
  We will run into all sorts of issues. For example, there are already subscription models for cars. Want a seat heating? Nice! US$9.99 per month, only! Chips can be printed on flexible plastics for years, but we are approaching sizes now that makes it potentially possible to include this into all sorts of things. With very low power this opens up all sorts of "invisible" ways to power them, and guess what? They run software. Now imagine these software pieces running a subscription model. And our lives are increasingly infiltrated with all sorts of such tech, unseen, and this subscription model path is a very slippery slope towards hell. I should also note here that there are huge differences between for example paying for "service" (but you do own the stuff), and this "cloud SaaS" approach that is often taken, where you own exactly nothing. Former is ok, a fair deal I would say, latter is a bane to our society. Keep in mind that the more our world depends on such things, the more these things become infrastructure, and infrastructure has some added requirements most of these services don't and won't fulfill.