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> free products to get people hooked This is due to the WWW which took off only due to its open model (shipping markup source instead of binary blobs) which wa

> free products to get people hooked This is due to the WWW which took off only due to its open model (shipping markup source instead of binary blobs) which was inspired by the then-nascent F/OSS movement. That F/OSS "gift culture" really keeps on giving, eh?

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Yes, I'm actually starting to agree with the stereotypical Gates view in those "Linux is communist jokes" of yore. Because as it turned out, F/OSS killed the ability to just sell software, taking the basic, honest business model of exchanging money for value. So now everyone finds increasingly more abusive ways to make money off their software, and some are even shameless enough to open-source the software itself and claim that makes them the good guys. (Of course the actual reason for open-sourcing of core products is to soil the entire market segment, preventing would-be competitors from selling a competing product.)
- account42 2y ago
  FOSS didn't do that at all except in (relatively few) nieches where the FOSS software is superior to commercial alternatives and there you can just use those FOSS programs without being subjected to the abusive commercial software. Bad for WinRAR maybe but not a problem at all for users. Linux never stopped MS and Apple from selling their OS. iOS and Android are paid for with the device purchase. What killed the ability to sell software is ads as well as the VC funded startup model where the first step is to acquire users and drive out competition at all costs. This essentially means giving things away for free only to extract value later. Thi doesn't have anything to do with FOSS but is just the free samples model taken to the extreme. FOSS is completely irrelevant to the viability commercial websites (or other services) but yet you see the same problems there - ads, dark patterns, attempts to lock in users so they can be fleeced.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > FOSS didn't do that at all except in (relatively few) nieches where the FOSS software is superior to commercial alternatives and there you can just use those FOSS programs without being subjected to the abusive commercial software. You're thinking end-user software, but that's not where the bulk of the now-dead software market would be. Think libraries. People used to, and in some specific applications still do, sell proprietary toolkits or component libraries. Also, a free solution doesn't need to be superior, or even equal to, a commercial ones, to kill the latter - it just needs to give an impression that it could do the same things as proprietary offering; companies are happy to give workers shitty software, or throw warm bodies at underfeatured libraries, if it looks like they can save on licensing costs of better proprietary tools. (There's a limit to that, which is why selling software is still somewhat possible in B2B context. Consumers and very small companies, on the other hand, are willing to go to extreme effort in order to avoid paying anything, opportunity costs be damned.)
    - account42 2y ago
      How is this a problem though? Where are the abusive business models in free libraries? And yes, the open source libraries that replaced closed source ones are often superior. And that's even before considering that having source code access and the right to distribute modified versions is itself HUGE - a library is immensively more valuable if you can go fix problems yourself instead of being blocked by a vendor that has different priorities from you. Is your issue simply that open source made some business models obsolete? Because that's just a natural part of progress and not an issue in of itself as far as I'm concerned. > Consumers and very small companies, on the other hand, are willing to go to extreme effort in order to avoid paying anything, opportunity costs be damned. That really depends on the kind of software though. Yeah, I'm not going to pay for yet another version some standard tool that has been available for decades with only marginal improvements. But truly unique software can still sell. Games are a good example. There is also the matter of risk. If an open source project dies then someone else can pick it up or you yourself (in case of developers or small businesses) can make the usually minor changes needed to keep it running. If a proprietary software business dies or just tries to add anti-user features because these days getting money from selling something isn't enough then you are SOL - better hope that a competitor is available and can import all the proprietary data formats.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

Yes, I'm actually starting to agree with the stereotypical Gates view in those "Linux is communist jokes" of yore. Because as it turned out, F/OSS killed the ability to just sell software, taking the basic, honest business model of exchanging money for value. So now everyone finds increasingly more abusive ways to make money off their software, and some are even shameless enough to open-source the software itself and claim that makes them the good guys. (Of course the actual reason for open-sourcing of core products is to soil the entire market segment, preventing would-be competitors from selling a competing product.)

account42 2y ago
FOSS didn't do that at all except in (relatively few) nieches where the FOSS software is superior to commercial alternatives and there you can just use those FOSS programs without being subjected to the abusive commercial software. Bad for WinRAR maybe but not a problem at all for users. Linux never stopped MS and Apple from selling their OS. iOS and Android are paid for with the device purchase. What killed the ability to sell software is ads as well as the VC funded startup model where the first step is to acquire users and drive out competition at all costs. This essentially means giving things away for free only to extract value later. Thi doesn't have anything to do with FOSS but is just the free samples model taken to the extreme. FOSS is completely irrelevant to the viability commercial websites (or other services) but yet you see the same problems there - ads, dark patterns, attempts to lock in users so they can be fleeced.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > FOSS didn't do that at all except in (relatively few) nieches where the FOSS software is superior to commercial alternatives and there you can just use those FOSS programs without being subjected to the abusive commercial software. You're thinking end-user software, but that's not where the bulk of the now-dead software market would be. Think libraries. People used to, and in some specific applications still do, sell proprietary toolkits or component libraries. Also, a free solution doesn't need to be superior, or even equal to, a commercial ones, to kill the latter - it just needs to give an impression that it could do the same things as proprietary offering; companies are happy to give workers shitty software, or throw warm bodies at underfeatured libraries, if it looks like they can save on licensing costs of better proprietary tools. (There's a limit to that, which is why selling software is still somewhat possible in B2B context. Consumers and very small companies, on the other hand, are willing to go to extreme effort in order to avoid paying anything, opportunity costs be damned.)
  - account42 2y ago
    How is this a problem though? Where are the abusive business models in free libraries? And yes, the open source libraries that replaced closed source ones are often superior. And that's even before considering that having source code access and the right to distribute modified versions is itself HUGE - a library is immensively more valuable if you can go fix problems yourself instead of being blocked by a vendor that has different priorities from you. Is your issue simply that open source made some business models obsolete? Because that's just a natural part of progress and not an issue in of itself as far as I'm concerned. > Consumers and very small companies, on the other hand, are willing to go to extreme effort in order to avoid paying anything, opportunity costs be damned. That really depends on the kind of software though. Yeah, I'm not going to pay for yet another version some standard tool that has been available for decades with only marginal improvements. But truly unique software can still sell. Games are a good example. There is also the matter of risk. If an open source project dies then someone else can pick it up or you yourself (in case of developers or small businesses) can make the usually minor changes needed to keep it running. If a proprietary software business dies or just tries to add anti-user features because these days getting money from selling something isn't enough then you are SOL - better hope that a competitor is available and can import all the proprietary data formats.