9 ms·
Even if you only sell shrinkwrap software there are ongoing costs for your business in the form of sales, accounting/payroll, office rent, customer support and
by sophacles 2y ago
Even if you only sell shrinkwrap software there are ongoing costs for your business in the form of sales, accounting/payroll, office rent, customer support and so on.
If you want to have bugfixes available for customers you have to pay developers to do that, and infrastructure for releasing them - this is an ongoing cost.
The problem is orthogonal to where software runs: there are subscription models for fully downloadable software that doesn't have to interact with a server (jetbrains for example, and some games).
- johnea 2y agoAll of the logic in this entire sub-thread is based on the idea that thet s/w has to be ssold by a vendor. Large orginazations, representing classes of users (architects, engineers, people who type documents and calculate numbers) could produce s/w for their own use, not to sell, and make this s/w available under a free software GPL license. They would save the money they would have spent buying this s/w, and spread those savings to everyone else who used the s/w. I don't want to retype or paste the entry I made below, but please read it and respond to this alternative. Thanks for the discussion!