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> Things would be better in the sense that markets would operate to determine the value of things. This is how the meatspace world works outside of software, an

> Things would be better in the sense that markets would operate to determine the value of things. This is how the meatspace world works outside of software, and also how the software world worked prior to Linux and OSS. I remember paying for DOS and paying for Borland Turbo C and paying for WordPerfect and paying for Lotus 123. In an alternate reality, where there isn't, and never was, free software, the tech space would look very very different: for one, you wouldn't have a trivial product pulling in a tech stack of 20+ other products, because it would be too expensive to deploy if your TODO-ish application had to pay license fees for an OS, a VM inside that OS, a container, a manager for containers, a RDBMS, an interface to the RDBMS (few devs use a RDBMS directly, anymore) a VM (JVM/CLR/Beam/V8) and/or runtime for the language (glibc, etc), extra services (S3, OIDC, etc) a dev-env for the language (compiler/interpreter, IDE+LSP), libraries (+5000 npm deps), source control, CI, CD ... and maybe all those crap little YAML-based tools to do what Make does at various stages of development. What we'd have is tight little software running with very few dependencies and a slick deployment that probably has no dependencies. Of course, it would take longer to write, so we probably also wouldn't have 300+ similar TODO-ish applications. New Development would coalesce around actually useful products if producing an MVP took longer than 5m.

fragmede 2y ago
I think about this a lot. If all software cost money, would users be more willing to pay for it? If everything was a $50-$100 utility app, $300 for a professional tool, and say $1,000 professional software package like Photoshop, would we have better software? instead of having to find some weird way to fund app development, like advertising, you could just write good software and people would pay you for that directly. I don't know that we'd not see dependencies though. It's sometimes better to pay for a good tool than home grow one, especially if that tool is outside your area of expertise and developing one would require a significant amount of resources. Eg a featureful VM hypervisor.

fragmede 2y ago

I think about this a lot. If all software cost money, would users be more willing to pay for it? If everything was a $50-$100 utility app, $300 for a professional tool, and say $1,000 professional software package like Photoshop, would we have better software? instead of having to find some weird way to fund app development, like advertising, you could just write good software and people would pay you for that directly. I don't know that we'd not see dependencies though. It's sometimes better to pay for a good tool than home grow one, especially if that tool is outside your area of expertise and developing one would require a significant amount of resources. Eg a featureful VM hypervisor.