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The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free. Also, the most difficu

The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free. Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them. No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated. So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0. Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.

otterley 5d ago
> if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free. That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
- jongjong 5d ago
  I disagree that a viable market exists. What set of arrangements exist there may be viable, for select few people, but it's not a market. A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete after receiving investment from certain VCs (and otherwise can't participate, at any price point), then it's not a market. Also I'm not claiming anything about the past. I'm just saying today, there's no market.
  - otterley 5d ago
    > A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. That's a pretty narrow definition. Markets can also compete on features.
Veserv 5d ago
The label has not lost its meaning. Everybody knows what it means and wants it, just almost everybody “selling it” is claiming it without regard for the truth of their claim for their own financial gain. In polite society that is called lying and fraud.
- jongjong 5d ago
  People accept a surprising amount of unreliability. For example, I've been using SharePoint to modify excel files at scale. We kept running into issues with cache that we would write to a file, the service would respond with success, but then when we read the file, it shows the old cached value, not the new one we just WROTE! And there was no reliable way to check when the newly written value had been completely flushed using that API. Microsoft will call this 'optimized'. They'll say that caching is good; it's a feature, not a bug! But really, it's unreliable! It's not doing the job it claims to do.
deleted 5d ago
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otterley 5d ago

> if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free. That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.

jongjong 5d ago
I disagree that a viable market exists. What set of arrangements exist there may be viable, for select few people, but it's not a market. A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete after receiving investment from certain VCs (and otherwise can't participate, at any price point), then it's not a market. Also I'm not claiming anything about the past. I'm just saying today, there's no market.
- otterley 5d ago
  > A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. That's a pretty narrow definition. Markets can also compete on features.

Veserv 5d ago

The label has not lost its meaning. Everybody knows what it means and wants it, just almost everybody “selling it” is claiming it without regard for the truth of their claim for their own financial gain. In polite society that is called lying and fraud.

jongjong 5d ago
People accept a surprising amount of unreliability. For example, I've been using SharePoint to modify excel files at scale. We kept running into issues with cache that we would write to a file, the service would respond with success, but then when we read the file, it shows the old cached value, not the new one we just WROTE! And there was no reliable way to check when the newly written value had been completely flushed using that API. Microsoft will call this 'optimized'. They'll say that caching is good; it's a feature, not a bug! But really, it's unreliable! It's not doing the job it claims to do.

deleted 5d ago

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