7 ms·

I wish there was an actual thriving business model like this -- just fixing most annoying bugs, for a price, of commonly used desktop software. Why proprietary

I wish there was an actual thriving business model like this -- just fixing most annoying bugs, for a price, of commonly used desktop software. Why proprietary software companies cannot or do not want to provide this service is over me. Perhaps I'm too much used to consulting.

kgwxd 11mo ago
The paperwork.
kykat 11mo ago
I think that 2k is really really cheap for the expertise in kernel development
- AlotOfReading 11mo ago
  It is, but it's amazing how cheap kernel expertise is relative to comparable experience in other specialties like frontend.
  - convolvatron 11mo ago
    there are a lot more kernel programmers than kernel work
- TZubiri 11mo ago
  But also lots of kernel developers work for free, so the average price of their work is very low
  - cyphar 11mo ago
    "Lots" is a relative term, but the overwhelming majority of kernel developers are employed and usually do kernel work as part of their job (usually at least ~80% but it could be argued as high as 97% depending on how you interpret the breakdown done by LWN of each release[1]). [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/
    - pm215 11mo ago
      And I would guess that most of the kernel devs who are "working for free" are doing the stuff they personally enjoy and find satisfaction in working on, because it's a hobby -- so many of them are probably not interested in fixing random bugs for cash either.
Gigachad 11mo ago
People spam the most minimal viable patch to collect the bounty and move on. And these days they are sending an AI slop solution. It doesn’t promote good code like actually hiring someone.
layer8 11mo ago
Given that “fixing this issue required weeks of intensive work from multiple people”, the price would have to be prohibitively high. More generally, software is really, really expensive to produce and maintain. The economics only work at scale, in particular for B2C. (Maybe AI will change that, if it becomes more reliable.)
- ffsm8 11mo ago
  Eh, I think you're underestimating some people perseverance. You generally only need multiple people for timely action, and it usually even slows you down (from the perspective of total hours spent) Like 2k bug bounty? I guarantee you some people would be willing to spend a lot of time for that. But yeah, people which are gainfully employed and have a decent salary - likely not.
  - layer8 11mo ago
    People will have fun spending their free time on such projects. But it’s virtually impossible to turn it into “an actual thriving business model” that people can make a living on.
    - rjdj377dhabsn 11mo ago
      Why not? In much of the world, working on one of those a month would provide a comfortable living.
      - layer8 11mo ago
        This $1900 bug bounty is quite an outlier, you generally won’t find one per month. An additional challenge is that it’s hard to predict how much work something will take, or whether there are any showstoppers. Also, if you don’t live in the same country as the client, it will be more difficult to get legal assurance that you’ll receive your money (or for the client that they won’t lose their money).
        11mo ago
1970-01-01 11mo ago
Did you realize that you didn't include 'open source' in your statement? This is exactly what the desktop OS makers -Microsoft and Apple- do every single day. Their prices are mostly B2B and therefore hidden, but there is a steady income for each person involved in making the fix.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  and yet, Microsoft Teams is a total trash fire full of bugs that users hate. So something is broken (Teams. It's Teams that is busted).
  - dahcryn 11mo ago
    it's the management structure that's broken. Plenty of decent engineers around microsoft who could fix it, plenty of customer and enterprises willing to pay, but they are not allowed to work on it because of prioritization bullshit, allegedly they could get more money elsewhere That's literally the issue, management by KPI frameworks
    - snoman 11mo ago
      I think it has more to do with bundling reducing the need to compete to zero. Change that and the economics of competition would take over and the changes would get prioritized but nobody at Teams needs to sell a single license, so the priorities become the bs like internal status and visibility and not product success. How many companies have Teams for basically free with their 365 license but still pay for Slack? The marginal value of Teams is nearly zero.
    - inopinatus 11mo ago
      There is also a matter of selective effort by staff senior enough to make their own choices. Many SDE3 (or whatever MS equivalent is) wouldn’t want to be associated with a dumpster fire product like Teams.
  - firesteelrain 11mo ago
    I have used it every day for past 3-4 years. What bugs? I don’t love it but I don’t hate it either. I don’t understand the Teams hate
pm215 11mo ago
For small stuff, the cost is just going to be too much for people to want to pay it. This bug had a $1900 bounty attached. Let's put the cost of one software engineer (salary plus overheads) at $200,000 a year, which I think is an underestimate. That's $3850 a week, so unless your bug can definitely be fixed (including getting any necessary hardware, investigation, fixing, code review overhead, etc) in two or three days it doesn't pay. And if it could obviously be done in two days then it's likely somebody would have already done that. The above back of envelope maths ignores the overheads of interacting with the people who posted the bounties to get them to agree to pay up, and of the cost overruns on the class of bugs that look like two day fixes but take two weeks.
- jusssi 11mo ago
  $200k is one expensive software engineer. On average, you can get people to work for much less.
  - ssl-3 11mo ago
    I believe that the $200k figure was meant to express what such a person might cost the company, not what that person would be paid as salary. (And it's just a placeholder. $200k seems like it's at least in the direction of the right ballpark.)
  - pm215 11mo ago
    I assumed the commonly cited 2x markup, so that would be a $100k salary, which is less than various websites say is the average US software dev salary. You could probably find cheaper elsewhere in the world, but even if you cut the salary in half that's still "bug must be doable in a week", which isn't going to cover many of the bugs people will care about.
  - tstrimple 11mo ago
    Paying for software developers is really weird. State governments for example struggle to pay for a FTE that makes $140k. But they can pay me over $200/hour for consulting services for multiple years. The technical FTE employees that they have generally aren't qualified to evaluate their consulting needs so you get multi-million dollar contracts with very little actual oversight. I was really impressed with the folks I was working with at this particular state government and looked into what it would look like if I joined them full time as a FTE technology leader. I would have to take almost a 50% pay cut. The top senior IT position that oversees all of the state resources makes 70% of what I do. It's crazy. Unless you're working in medicine or sports, government pay sucks. I've seen similar but less extreme examples play out in the private sector. 16 year senior architect making less than freshly hired software dev that was just an intern within the same company. Software developer pay is largely based on what you're demanding. In a lot of companies, there is a wide range of pay for folks doing literally the same job. They will hire a dev at $180k because that dev wouldn't go lower and turn around and push back to get another dev at $120k for the same level of unproven experience.
tormeh 11mo ago
Yeah, you'd want some sort of micro-kickstarting website where users can pool money that goes into paying for some fix or feature if the committed money crosses a threshold.
IshKebab 11mo ago
I think the real issues are attributing work, and fear of doing a ton of work only to be pipped at the post.
Razengan 11mo ago
I'd gladly pay a couple hundred to have Swift-like optionals in Godot's GDScript, among other things that are just a pain to convince all the random idiots on their official spaces of, but GitHub doesn't have a way to offer that :(
drunner 11mo ago
I wish there was regulation that you have to sell and maintain a working product, so that open source devs don't have to waste their time fixing proprietary products.
- nickff 11mo ago
  It looks like these laptops are usually sold with Windows; are you saying that every manufacturer should be obligated to develop drivers for every software which is theoretically compatible with it? Or are you just saying that we need even more caveats in the interminable EULAs we all just click through?
  - BenjiWiebe 11mo ago
    Maybe the obligation should be to provide adequate information about the hardware, so anyone could make a driver for their own software if they so desire.
exabrial 11mo ago
The problem is one-offs don't make steady, predictable, recurring revenue. Owning a consulting business is hard: you have to have customers waiting.
BobbyTables2 11mo ago
Well, if one person spent a month on this, they’d be making about $10/hr. Makes StarBucks barista pay look good… Of course, if they can churn this out closer to 2 days, maybe there is something there. Such a talented person would probably prefer a more certain and higher income.
- sublinear 11mo ago
  I don't think this argument is accurate. There are other reasons to do this work even for free such as self-promotion, community-building, hobby, etc. I think the real blockers are the legal implications of reverse engineering.
- qingcharles 11mo ago
  For a lot of people in the world $10/hr is a fantastic wage. And you get to work at your own pace, probably from home.
  - johnisgood 11mo ago
    And for a lot of people it is fantastic to have one slice of bread per day. What is your point?
tiagod 11mo ago
Sort of unrelated, but I've been thinking a lot of founding a non-profit that fund raises just to undercut the usual shitty consultancy companies that build government websites and apps just to build them properly.
thombles 11mo ago
Out of all bugs and feature requests, this one is an outlier in that it requires specific hardware to work on and has an obvious success condition. This means that every man and his dog is not going to be throwing an LLM at this to see if their particular slop wins the prize. People get weird when money is on the line and managing a bounty is a job for which I would never volunteer.
jijijijij 11mo ago
Since you are talking about proprietary software, I assume you mean fixing bugs by the corpo devs themselves. Well, this would imply broken software. You already payed for the software, now you are required to pay to get bugs fixed? Bad optics, although not beyond contemporary sentiments... Inherently shady incentives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive This kinda only works best for FOSS, incentivizing external devs IMO.
ValdikSS 11mo ago
There is some—VueScan for example, where the developer reverse-engineer scanning protocols, re-implement and sell it.

kgwxd 11mo ago

The paperwork.

kykat 11mo ago

I think that 2k is really really cheap for the expertise in kernel development

AlotOfReading 11mo ago
It is, but it's amazing how cheap kernel expertise is relative to comparable experience in other specialties like frontend.
- convolvatron 11mo ago
  there are a lot more kernel programmers than kernel work
TZubiri 11mo ago
But also lots of kernel developers work for free, so the average price of their work is very low
- cyphar 11mo ago
  "Lots" is a relative term, but the overwhelming majority of kernel developers are employed and usually do kernel work as part of their job (usually at least ~80% but it could be argued as high as 97% depending on how you interpret the breakdown done by LWN of each release[1]). [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/
  - pm215 11mo ago
    And I would guess that most of the kernel devs who are "working for free" are doing the stuff they personally enjoy and find satisfaction in working on, because it's a hobby -- so many of them are probably not interested in fixing random bugs for cash either.

Gigachad 11mo ago

People spam the most minimal viable patch to collect the bounty and move on. And these days they are sending an AI slop solution. It doesn’t promote good code like actually hiring someone.

layer8 11mo ago

Given that “fixing this issue required weeks of intensive work from multiple people”, the price would have to be prohibitively high. More generally, software is really, really expensive to produce and maintain. The economics only work at scale, in particular for B2C. (Maybe AI will change that, if it becomes more reliable.)

ffsm8 11mo ago
Eh, I think you're underestimating some people perseverance. You generally only need multiple people for timely action, and it usually even slows you down (from the perspective of total hours spent) Like 2k bug bounty? I guarantee you some people would be willing to spend a lot of time for that. But yeah, people which are gainfully employed and have a decent salary - likely not.
- layer8 11mo ago
  People will have fun spending their free time on such projects. But it’s virtually impossible to turn it into “an actual thriving business model” that people can make a living on.
  - rjdj377dhabsn 11mo ago
    Why not? In much of the world, working on one of those a month would provide a comfortable living.
    - layer8 11mo ago
      This $1900 bug bounty is quite an outlier, you generally won’t find one per month. An additional challenge is that it’s hard to predict how much work something will take, or whether there are any showstoppers. Also, if you don’t live in the same country as the client, it will be more difficult to get legal assurance that you’ll receive your money (or for the client that they won’t lose their money).
      - 11mo ago

1970-01-01 11mo ago

Did you realize that you didn't include 'open source' in your statement? This is exactly what the desktop OS makers -Microsoft and Apple- do every single day. Their prices are mostly B2B and therefore hidden, but there is a steady income for each person involved in making the fix.

fragmede 11mo ago
and yet, Microsoft Teams is a total trash fire full of bugs that users hate. So something is broken (Teams. It's Teams that is busted).
- dahcryn 11mo ago
  it's the management structure that's broken. Plenty of decent engineers around microsoft who could fix it, plenty of customer and enterprises willing to pay, but they are not allowed to work on it because of prioritization bullshit, allegedly they could get more money elsewhere That's literally the issue, management by KPI frameworks
  - snoman 11mo ago
    I think it has more to do with bundling reducing the need to compete to zero. Change that and the economics of competition would take over and the changes would get prioritized but nobody at Teams needs to sell a single license, so the priorities become the bs like internal status and visibility and not product success. How many companies have Teams for basically free with their 365 license but still pay for Slack? The marginal value of Teams is nearly zero.
  - inopinatus 11mo ago
    There is also a matter of selective effort by staff senior enough to make their own choices. Many SDE3 (or whatever MS equivalent is) wouldn’t want to be associated with a dumpster fire product like Teams.
- firesteelrain 11mo ago
  I have used it every day for past 3-4 years. What bugs? I don’t love it but I don’t hate it either. I don’t understand the Teams hate

pm215 11mo ago

For small stuff, the cost is just going to be too much for people to want to pay it. This bug had a $1900 bounty attached. Let's put the cost of one software engineer (salary plus overheads) at $200,000 a year, which I think is an underestimate. That's $3850 a week, so unless your bug can definitely be fixed (including getting any necessary hardware, investigation, fixing, code review overhead, etc) in two or three days it doesn't pay. And if it could obviously be done in two days then it's likely somebody would have already done that. The above back of envelope maths ignores the overheads of interacting with the people who posted the bounties to get them to agree to pay up, and of the cost overruns on the class of bugs that look like two day fixes but take two weeks.

jusssi 11mo ago
$200k is one expensive software engineer. On average, you can get people to work for much less.
- ssl-3 11mo ago
  I believe that the $200k figure was meant to express what such a person might cost the company, not what that person would be paid as salary. (And it's just a placeholder. $200k seems like it's at least in the direction of the right ballpark.)
- pm215 11mo ago
  I assumed the commonly cited 2x markup, so that would be a $100k salary, which is less than various websites say is the average US software dev salary. You could probably find cheaper elsewhere in the world, but even if you cut the salary in half that's still "bug must be doable in a week", which isn't going to cover many of the bugs people will care about.
- tstrimple 11mo ago
  Paying for software developers is really weird. State governments for example struggle to pay for a FTE that makes $140k. But they can pay me over $200/hour for consulting services for multiple years. The technical FTE employees that they have generally aren't qualified to evaluate their consulting needs so you get multi-million dollar contracts with very little actual oversight. I was really impressed with the folks I was working with at this particular state government and looked into what it would look like if I joined them full time as a FTE technology leader. I would have to take almost a 50% pay cut. The top senior IT position that oversees all of the state resources makes 70% of what I do. It's crazy. Unless you're working in medicine or sports, government pay sucks. I've seen similar but less extreme examples play out in the private sector. 16 year senior architect making less than freshly hired software dev that was just an intern within the same company. Software developer pay is largely based on what you're demanding. In a lot of companies, there is a wide range of pay for folks doing literally the same job. They will hire a dev at $180k because that dev wouldn't go lower and turn around and push back to get another dev at $120k for the same level of unproven experience.

tormeh 11mo ago

Yeah, you'd want some sort of micro-kickstarting website where users can pool money that goes into paying for some fix or feature if the committed money crosses a threshold.

IshKebab 11mo ago

I think the real issues are attributing work, and fear of doing a ton of work only to be pipped at the post.

Razengan 11mo ago

I'd gladly pay a couple hundred to have Swift-like optionals in Godot's GDScript, among other things that are just a pain to convince all the random idiots on their official spaces of, but GitHub doesn't have a way to offer that :(

drunner 11mo ago

I wish there was regulation that you have to sell and maintain a working product, so that open source devs don't have to waste their time fixing proprietary products.

nickff 11mo ago
It looks like these laptops are usually sold with Windows; are you saying that every manufacturer should be obligated to develop drivers for every software which is theoretically compatible with it? Or are you just saying that we need even more caveats in the interminable EULAs we all just click through?
- BenjiWiebe 11mo ago
  Maybe the obligation should be to provide adequate information about the hardware, so anyone could make a driver for their own software if they so desire.

exabrial 11mo ago

The problem is one-offs don't make steady, predictable, recurring revenue. Owning a consulting business is hard: you have to have customers waiting.

BobbyTables2 11mo ago

Well, if one person spent a month on this, they’d be making about $10/hr. Makes StarBucks barista pay look good… Of course, if they can churn this out closer to 2 days, maybe there is something there. Such a talented person would probably prefer a more certain and higher income.

sublinear 11mo ago
I don't think this argument is accurate. There are other reasons to do this work even for free such as self-promotion, community-building, hobby, etc. I think the real blockers are the legal implications of reverse engineering.
qingcharles 11mo ago
For a lot of people in the world $10/hr is a fantastic wage. And you get to work at your own pace, probably from home.
- johnisgood 11mo ago
  And for a lot of people it is fantastic to have one slice of bread per day. What is your point?

tiagod 11mo ago

Sort of unrelated, but I've been thinking a lot of founding a non-profit that fund raises just to undercut the usual shitty consultancy companies that build government websites and apps just to build them properly.

thombles 11mo ago

Out of all bugs and feature requests, this one is an outlier in that it requires specific hardware to work on and has an obvious success condition. This means that every man and his dog is not going to be throwing an LLM at this to see if their particular slop wins the prize. People get weird when money is on the line and managing a bounty is a job for which I would never volunteer.

jijijijij 11mo ago

Since you are talking about proprietary software, I assume you mean fixing bugs by the corpo devs themselves. Well, this would imply broken software. You already payed for the software, now you are required to pay to get bugs fixed? Bad optics, although not beyond contemporary sentiments... Inherently shady incentives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive This kinda only works best for FOSS, incentivizing external devs IMO.

ValdikSS 11mo ago

There is some—VueScan for example, where the developer reverse-engineer scanning protocols, re-implement and sell it.