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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 discuss

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.
- bruce511 3y ago
  So the subscription model worked well for (some kinds of) software. And yes, businesses want reoccurring revenue (they'd rather rent/lease me the car than sell it outright.) But fundamentally, with software, something is on _offer_ for the subscription. In my case we use subscriptions to pay for ongoing support staff (which customers _want_) because we can't fund support from sales (that's not sustainable.) Support-pay-as-you-go is not popular because the person needing support needs it now (not in 30 days once procurement has signed off on it.) Sure, there are subscription models for cars. There are also lots of cars that are sold outright. There are lots of cars sold on lease or HP basis. There are lots of models to choose from. Chips have been running software (microcode) since forever. That software pretty much never changes, I certainly can't phone Intel for support, so I don't pay for a subscription on it. Should you buy physical books, or just ebooks for your kindle? That's up to you. Some like one way, some like the other. Clearly the ownership is different. But then some people own a house, and some rent. I'm not sure any of this is new.
  - advael 3y ago
    Your last example is the crux of the matter. Consider: As a percentage of the population, fewer people (in the US at least, though I get the sense this is true elsewhere too) own their home now than any time in living memory. Shocks to the housing market exacerbated this trend, most famously in 2008 and 2020. Housing precarity (which we can simplify as "risk of homelessness", and for which actual homelessness is a decent if imperfect proxy) has risen across the board and I think it's fair to assume these are correlated Sure, there are valid reasons to want to rent your home. More flexibility to move maybe. Not wanting to deal with maintenance I suppose (though as economic and legal power has shifted in turn to landlords, you can effectively be responsible for maintaining a home in that your landlord will not be compelled to fix issues that harm you, but also legally barred from doing so), but it's objectively and by far the economically worse option, and the vast majority of people don't actually want to rent for their entire lives. The reason more people don't own their homes is because they are economically prevented from doing so by a combination of squeezed supply and increasingly unfavorable competition with massive companies and trusts that treat real estate primarily as as investment vehicle. People who rent and don't want to largely don't have a choice Nonetheless, press written from the perspective of the class who owns houses treats this as a weird preference the younger generation has for some reason. Sure, it's inherently precarious and long-term financially ruinous, but I guess they just like it that way? Usually when vast swaths of people are making choices that harm them while benefiting powerful people, the first-line model we should apply to the situation is not weird preferences This is more obvious with housing, but arguably even more true of tools, especially ones people rely on for their own work
somenameforme 3y ago
The desire for ownership of your software most certainly doesn't just came from techies. I think this is the norm for the overwhelming majority of all people. There's a fundamental "problem" that software-by-license is trying to solve. That's the fact that most software, in most domains, became good enough to do whatever you want with it, and pretty easily, years ago. Such tough times we live in. But the reason this is a problem is because companies have a zillion employees, sprawling high cost 'campuses', and baseline costs in the billions to tens of billions of dollars. So they need to sell to keep selling you new versions of products that don't really do anything new. And so this is where we enter the domain of 'free to play' style operating systems, paying rent for a spreadsheet, and so on. All of these business models completely suck for most people. And they're also completely self defeating at scale. Because paying $20/month for Photoshop might sound nice compared to a $2000 up-front fee for something you might not even be using in a decade, until every single piece of software you're using tries to go the same route - and suddenly to do everything you were doing before, you'd need to pay $2000/month forever (of course with annual price increases), all the while everything you're using also spies on you, tries to deliver "value added ads", and all other sorts of crap. It sucks. If companies were able to deliver products that people actively and enthusiastically wanted to buy, they would be. But they can't. So we get licenses, fees, rent for everything, spying, ads, and the further general enshittification of everything tech.
- basseq 3y ago
  People tend to want to best of both worlds. They want to "own their software" (i.e., pay once, use forever) but they also want the benefits of SaaS: low up-front investment, cloud services, continual evolution, network effects, etc. Photoshop is an easy example: would you rather pay $400 up front to have version X.X forever, or $10/mo forever to always have the latest version. That's a tradeoff! Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2. Cloud services are even harder because you start talking hardware. "Owning Photoshop" is easy because it runs on my computer. I'm maintaining my computer for me and only me. What would "owning their software" even look like for, I donno, Github? Are you running your own AWS instance? Are other people running their own instances? There are ways to build P2P software, or on-prem enterprise stuff... but no one really wants to buy it. They're ok paying $10/mo for the billions of dollars of infrastructure because there's really no other way to do it.

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.

bruce511 3y ago
So the subscription model worked well for (some kinds of) software. And yes, businesses want reoccurring revenue (they'd rather rent/lease me the car than sell it outright.) But fundamentally, with software, something is on _offer_ for the subscription. In my case we use subscriptions to pay for ongoing support staff (which customers _want_) because we can't fund support from sales (that's not sustainable.) Support-pay-as-you-go is not popular because the person needing support needs it now (not in 30 days once procurement has signed off on it.) Sure, there are subscription models for cars. There are also lots of cars that are sold outright. There are lots of cars sold on lease or HP basis. There are lots of models to choose from. Chips have been running software (microcode) since forever. That software pretty much never changes, I certainly can't phone Intel for support, so I don't pay for a subscription on it. Should you buy physical books, or just ebooks for your kindle? That's up to you. Some like one way, some like the other. Clearly the ownership is different. But then some people own a house, and some rent. I'm not sure any of this is new.
- advael 3y ago
  Your last example is the crux of the matter. Consider: As a percentage of the population, fewer people (in the US at least, though I get the sense this is true elsewhere too) own their home now than any time in living memory. Shocks to the housing market exacerbated this trend, most famously in 2008 and 2020. Housing precarity (which we can simplify as "risk of homelessness", and for which actual homelessness is a decent if imperfect proxy) has risen across the board and I think it's fair to assume these are correlated Sure, there are valid reasons to want to rent your home. More flexibility to move maybe. Not wanting to deal with maintenance I suppose (though as economic and legal power has shifted in turn to landlords, you can effectively be responsible for maintaining a home in that your landlord will not be compelled to fix issues that harm you, but also legally barred from doing so), but it's objectively and by far the economically worse option, and the vast majority of people don't actually want to rent for their entire lives. The reason more people don't own their homes is because they are economically prevented from doing so by a combination of squeezed supply and increasingly unfavorable competition with massive companies and trusts that treat real estate primarily as as investment vehicle. People who rent and don't want to largely don't have a choice Nonetheless, press written from the perspective of the class who owns houses treats this as a weird preference the younger generation has for some reason. Sure, it's inherently precarious and long-term financially ruinous, but I guess they just like it that way? Usually when vast swaths of people are making choices that harm them while benefiting powerful people, the first-line model we should apply to the situation is not weird preferences This is more obvious with housing, but arguably even more true of tools, especially ones people rely on for their own work

somenameforme 3y ago

The desire for ownership of your software most certainly doesn't just came from techies. I think this is the norm for the overwhelming majority of all people. There's a fundamental "problem" that software-by-license is trying to solve. That's the fact that most software, in most domains, became good enough to do whatever you want with it, and pretty easily, years ago. Such tough times we live in. But the reason this is a problem is because companies have a zillion employees, sprawling high cost 'campuses', and baseline costs in the billions to tens of billions of dollars. So they need to sell to keep selling you new versions of products that don't really do anything new. And so this is where we enter the domain of 'free to play' style operating systems, paying rent for a spreadsheet, and so on. All of these business models completely suck for most people. And they're also completely self defeating at scale. Because paying $20/month for Photoshop might sound nice compared to a $2000 up-front fee for something you might not even be using in a decade, until every single piece of software you're using tries to go the same route - and suddenly to do everything you were doing before, you'd need to pay $2000/month forever (of course with annual price increases), all the while everything you're using also spies on you, tries to deliver "value added ads", and all other sorts of crap. It sucks. If companies were able to deliver products that people actively and enthusiastically wanted to buy, they would be. But they can't. So we get licenses, fees, rent for everything, spying, ads, and the further general enshittification of everything tech.

basseq 3y ago
People tend to want to best of both worlds. They want to "own their software" (i.e., pay once, use forever) but they also want the benefits of SaaS: low up-front investment, cloud services, continual evolution, network effects, etc. Photoshop is an easy example: would you rather pay $400 up front to have version X.X forever, or $10/mo forever to always have the latest version. That's a tradeoff! Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2. Cloud services are even harder because you start talking hardware. "Owning Photoshop" is easy because it runs on my computer. I'm maintaining my computer for me and only me. What would "owning their software" even look like for, I donno, Github? Are you running your own AWS instance? Are other people running their own instances? There are ways to build P2P software, or on-prem enterprise stuff... but no one really wants to buy it. They're ok paying $10/mo for the billions of dollars of infrastructure because there's really no other way to do it.