Would things work better if you paid for every one of those? How much free do you have to contribute to get all these things in return? The network effect creates an incredible ratio, in part because moving bits is nearly free.

Ask the inverse question: Why would we pay when we can exchange these things for free?

Edit: Also, if you want to change the world, to contribute to it, freedom often facilitates that.

That being said I also produce software for a living as well and there’s nothing wrong with that either. It’s not either or. It’s yes and.

The incremental cost if duplicating and giving away a piece of software is nothing at all.

If you want to be generous to the world, open source is an incredibly cost effective way to do that!

(I remain extremely interested in ways we can ensure open source developers do get compensated for the huge amount of value they put out into the world, but that's the key difference between carpenters and software developers.)

Just like with software developers, we want to find a way to compensate musicians, but that it proving a very intractable problem.

But instead you buy a table from Apple and it's only compatible with chairs from Apple. So you can't pay your local carpenter for repairs or better chairs.

Anyway, the big companies have long since realised it's more lucrative to stop selling the furniture and rent it out instead.

What do you build?

Have a think about the relative sizes of the carpenter market vs. the non-carpenter market.

0.5% of humans are devs, but 70% of humans have internet. 70-90% of internet users have made an online purchase. (I assume these AI slop answers are at least in the ballpark)

(Anyway I really don't have a head for business, so don't take my advice. I just like programming on and off the clock and I get a salary for it)

Now carpenters selling to regular people. Ok finally my brain clicks. Take the easy route. Sell to people who don't code and help them win. Then it's about specialisation I guess. You could build anything, maybe there's a focus area. I did build https://mu.xyz but yet to figure out that user demographic.

Thanks for the thought experiment

It really doesn’t.

The more toward “enterprise” a software buyer is, the more what they’re actually paying for is a reputation, reduced liability, a throat to choke, etc. Functionality is only one piece of the puzzle.

Whatever you've built is probably going to be worse than what an entire company can make

This is part of competition. It's common for businesses to have their value proposition challenged, and they either have to justify their existence, or die. If your whole company can be replaced by a single person tomorrow, it wasn't that valuable a company. We benefit more as a society by competition causing companies to be more efficient, and people having access to more value for less money.

Also, those people potentially losing their jobs isn't the end of the world. We all lose our jobs eventually, for one reason or another. We all have to expect that and be able to find a new job.

On the contrary, production cost has a great deal to do with what you can charge for something. In a perfectly efficient market, someone who charges more than what an item costs will sooner or later get outcompeted by someone who charges less. I think it's fair to say that production cost isn't the only factor in what you can charge, but to say "it has nothing to do with the price" is going way too far.

Consumers know that software can be reproduced cheaply and carpentry cannot.

I actually dumped a bunch of my project files into chatGPT, and asked it "Is there anything in here close to completion/close to marketable" and the answer was "Nope", which mirrors my own thoughts. My code is too niche, and the 10 or so people playing in the same space as my hobbies already have their own full working stacks and have no need for my stuff. One of my projects, I found 3 other people on a tiny discord, had already working prototypes with better software and hardware.

So I dump it all on my github for whatever minor assistance I can give anyone else with the same brainwoms that I have.

Software is not a thing in the same sense a chair is a thing, making copies cost nothing and that has two effects: you can build much more complex things, copies are dirt cheap.

It's the old discussion in the 90s of bits vs atoms. When you copy a bit, the original bit stays there, nothing is lost, so we implement artificial scarcity (in the form of copyrights) to encourage production.

Copying bits is easy, almost effort free, once you make one of the thing, making millions is cheap and easy, no matter how hard it was to make the first one.

It's not the same with a chair, making the first is marginally harder than making the second, but the difficulty of making copies doesn't radically diminish after you made the first one.

Integrated circuits, 3D printed stuff, and so on, are in the middle, they're atoms, but behave much closer to bits.

Once you make the first one, making more is relatively cheap and easy.

If you think of complexity, the easier something is to copy and tweak, the faster the complexity increases, that is a side effect of sharing, where more minds can improve on the thing.

Software is at one end of the complexity spectrum, and chairs are at the other.

That being said, there are negative aspects. Open source advocates can be a bit sanctimonious in the other direction. For example, complaints (not from the devs themselves) about corporations making loads off ffmpeg, or openssl, without adequately compensating them. Even though companies are employing the licensed apps as intended. Another issue is how entitled open source consumers can be: demanding free access to apps, or judging seemingly trivial apps for charging a fee.

Selling even a trivial business is hard work, and 90% of the time there's much more nuance to a business than meets the eye.

If someone chooses to donate their time for free, and it's not done out of spite to undermine a competitor, it's probably a good thing. But we could all use a bit more humility and introspection.

A big value of OSS is that it can obviate the need to reinvent the wheel. We should cheer on when open source software is used, regardless of whether the users are corporations or individuals.

For example, you can GPL code, and if a company does want to use it privately, sell them a license for their own private use.

I never understood why the open source ecosystem consolidated onto GPL-ish and MIT.

And of course, this in turn fed into other trends. People shared code routinely because they had always shared code routinely. The emergence of expensive code, could be held to be an anomoly: Most code of the day outside of commerce and military and secret places was written in publicly funded institutions, and shared as a matter of course, or at worst sold for cost-recovery prices.

This also relates to the emergence of "hold harmless" licencing terms. If you give something away, you want to be sure nobody comes back at you for redress.

Stallman's GNU Manifesto was a reaction to change in this landscape. It wasn't "hey, lets break the dam wall of sold software by inventing free software" it was "this modern trend to locking software up is wrong. I want to return to the roots of free software, which has always existed"

Music is the first thing that comes to mind. Nobody pays for music anymore. They maybe subscribe to a streaming service but most people expect to consume as much of the actual music basically for free.

Boxed software back in the day was something people would pay for, but like music it’s become an intangible commodity that people don’t feel they should pay for.

It’s a service economy now.

Spotify likes to tell a story about how they “saved the music industry from piracy”… but piracy clearly won. Napster et al reset consumer expectations that you get everything for almost free, instantly. The heart of the artist payment problem isn’t that Spotify pays out too little, it’s that listeners don’t pay in enough.

But this isn’t just a problem with music, its a problem when trying to figure out pricing for anything digital. All of our intuitions about what a physical thing in the real world should cost get really screwed up when theres zero cost to duplicating and we’re dealing with geographically unbounded internet-scale distribution channels.

Unlike hand crafted furniture, software has next to no durable value beyond the transactions it enables. Don’t get me wrong, software investment can be incredibly durable, e.g. banking and insurance mainframe apps built 50 years ago. But without a specific business application software itself is nearly worthless.

Writing open source software is probably better compared to published research. It’s an academic endeavor and also a way to put your name out in the world in a way that recognizes your contribution and may lead to commercial opportunities for you and/or your software.

There's also a similar crowd-funding idea here: https://reddit.com/r/oasisnetwork/comments/1py9cah/app_idea_... but releasing the funds is more discretionary and happens after delivery, with the work being more externally instigated - as opposed to passion projects just looking for buy-ins.

so it might be more pricey if you are using it a lot compared to self hosting itself but then again, the deployment hassle of it and some management aspects can be handled by the person who built the code and has expertise on it

So like for simple usd$, lets say that we can charge like 10$ instead of 5$ for a simple vps and this % thing scale (obviously 100% feel wrong but also transparent compared to how most Saas work)

Like perhaps its like byok but I have never seen it really that much widespread/easy and byok is usually only popular in large businesses cloud solutions themselves and not so much in hosted options/indie people like you and me

People are obviously going to want to host their new fangled vibe-coded projects too. Maybe with crypto and stablecoins there's a way to keep costs down and anonymity high. Perhaps anonymity is overlooked too in hosting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334025 .. I'd also look at providing options for getting users paying with x402.

Also hosting in Iceland looks interesting for a number of reasons. https://gemini.google.com/share/c6d7c4fa5f3d

one of the biggest issues to me feels like right now, its just not the time to buy hardware and colocate or create your own simply because of ramflation

I think one can probably get dedicated servers but some are more strict than others and can even shut down your services if abuse comes from downstream (hetzner's more strict, in my observation, most german providers usually are)

OVH and Upcloud are good solutions I can probably build upon but an aspect of me also wonders perhaps serverless (a more request focused and not hour focused) server thing might work as well?

My idea kind of came from the fact similar to the parent post itself about just frustrations regarding the fact that open source is so heavily underfunded and ways to probably get funding into it.

One of the biggest issues to me feels as if how would I even explain this idea and I want your opinion on it because I tried explaining it to my brother who works in CS and perhaps I didn't do a good job explaining it (I admit) but he basically said that what I wanted in the end was a more transparency focused saas/open source related but that itself is possible if saas themselves do it but the incentives in saas are to not be transparent so nobody really talks about the costs of server and transparency. So perhaps a paradigm where transparency is core becomes more suitable. Please let me know if you want to contact as honestly I'd like to hear some honest opinions/feedback about this.

Thank you and have a nice day!

The AIs will interview users (including observing screens) and watch how their systems are being used in real-time. They will see what/where people are spending money too.

The best users on HN of AI seem to be the ones that have the clearest visions and express that in a way that allows them to bypass code.

CRM SaaS for example will be replaced by people that say: Give me a CRM according to these parameters and integrating into these systems... etc. So like cPanel on steroids.

Also, AI will want access to train on systems. Maybe that's a business model: charging AIs to access servers to analyze different architecture implementations and business rules.

In the end, I wouldn't be surprised if things go more closed-source but that's just a feeling and the major $$$ will be made on hardware only or providing the documentation and software for AIs to train on. Something like that anyway. Maybe crypto is where the alliances will be made as systems become centered around those instead of languages.

Something else I struggle to understand is why some people/companies will build their entire business on top of software they don't own on top of third-party platform code that they can't even see. Somehow they prefer this than paying for an unlimited license to self-host and control the code. The companies who have access to the customers/end users definitely should have that kind of leverage over platform providers.

The software industry is weird to me. Saying this as someone who has been in it for almost 2 decades. I wish someone could explain it to me.

At a fundamental level, I cannot make sense of the relationship between people and software.

The duality of people making software free and open source only to be ignored completely and at the same time companies paying massive license fees for essentially the same or even inferior software... I suspect it's largely driven by cronyism.

I've always given away my code because I didn't write it to get paid, I wrote it because I just needed the code. It costs me nothing to give it away. I already benefit daily from other people doing this very thing, so it just makes sense to me to contribute back to the community I get so much from. The hobby software market was also like this when it first started (although unfortunately a lot of that was pirated software)

That's increasingly changed, thanks to some combination of Netflix and other consumer-facing subscriptions, the App Store's easy payment mechanisms, and in-app purcahses for digital goods in games spilling over into the real world. There's still more mental friction to paying for things online and more expectation of free by default, for most people, in tech than in the real world.

There's nothing wrong with that, but know what you're signing up for. If you just want to be paid like a carpenter, contracting for time and materials is the standard way to do that, much easier than starting a software company.

- subscriptions that promise improvements or act as DRM

- vendor contracts

- becoming a platform and extracting rent

- using your audience as an advertising resource

But the reality is that the hard part with software is discovering what's useful. Actually writing software has been getting easier for a while. Once you've discovered what's useful, no one is going to pay you for that. They can replicate. I'd rather use podman than docker.

I do not get the feeling that I did nor do wrong by acting this way nor do I feel like I'm doing wrong by using free software. In what way would the world be a better place if I started charging money for the mentioned services and started paying some of it for software?

To take iPhone apps as a category, some are paid, but most are "free", because experience shows that people will easily try a "free" app, greatly preferentially even if the price is $0.99. But for many, probably most, of such apps, there's in-app purchases, designed to be an ongoing source of revenue.

And before you say "the carpenter enjoys making chairs too"... I'll believe that if you can show me that a substantial percentage of carpenters spend 8 hours a day making chairs even when they're not monetising them. A substantial percentage of developers spend 8 hours a day coding when they're unemployed because they enjoy it.

Also keep this old saying in mind: "If you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold."

As others have already mentioned, it's possible to do both. But the things I work on in my "free time" are unlikely to be profitable anyway.

How much music, poetry, art, and writing is created and freely distributed - do you consider it without value?

to the students on the left , you pass them a note that asks them how much would they pay to hear you recite some poetry you wrote last night.

to the students on the right, you pass them a note that asks them how much would they pay so that they wont have to listen to you recite the (same) poetry you wrote last night.

its not just free. it can be worth negative money too.

But it is a pretty big deal when we deny medicine to sick children (or push families into taking on crushing medical debt).

Probably at least several million people annually are killed to maintain your financial incentives.

Profit motive is the singlemost powerful motivator for the pharmaceutical industry. Take that away, and let's see how many smart, hard-working people work their butts off to rescue sick children.

Maybe we get a few less drugs but I'd bet we'd see more curative cheap drugs we need desperately like antibiotics which are an economic dead-end today rather than the cost escalating for-life stop-gaps like statins, diabetes drugs, biologics, ed drugs, hair treatments, etc.

1. Internet has made distribution frictionless. So unlike giving out Uber trips, giving out code costs you nothing.

2. You have a real job. The "80% time" for which you're paid subsidizes the self-promotional work you do for free, and let's not kid ourselves: most of us write open-source not out of altruism but for the recognition.

3. Software is immediately useful. Lawyering is a lot like programming in that both involve putting pen to paper in just the right way. But pro bono legal work is a lot more painful than whipping up some code. Lawyers have to deal with people and all their bs.

4. Software is easy. I don't know why but the return on capital blows away the return on labor. Whereas Microsoft may have once derived most of their profit from software, they've now come around to the rest of the tech industry which is selling hardware and compute -- the software that comes with it is included.

I've only contributed to open source to fix bugs in software i use every day.

Thankfully, it's still early in the year, so this doesn't mean much yet but at least I can say it with complete certainty; so congratulations, you have said the dumbest thing I've heard all year!

> Does anyone get that feeling?

No, I don't feel bad about giving gifts. I don't feel bad about trying hard to make the world I'm forced to exist within a bit better even if that "better" is inconsequential. No I don't feel bad about not making the effort I'm able to produce, predicated on some sort of compensation. Neither compassion, nor the desire to try to help others is a bad thing! Why would I want to demand payment from people who I want to help?

I don't regret playing a positive sum game.

Especially when everyone around me is determined to play negative sum games, or force others into the same. Or in case of this question; have been gaslit so traumatically, that they feel they are wrong for trying to help other people without demanding compensation.

You're allowed to do nice things for others, without expecting anything from them in return.

Don't confuse gifts, with the effort required to exist in a "user hostile" universe. You might need to trade effort for compensation to 'survive'. But that doesn't devalue the positive improvement you're capable of, regardless of that reality. And it doesn't make it wrong to do so.

Its costs time to make a software thing once. Then once done, copying is basically 0 cost, and storage is near 0 cost, and bandwidth is near 0 cost.

If I make furniture, it costs resources for each thing I make. I can't copy a sofa 10e6 times for negligible costs.

Its also why "Shit as a service" is so popular in the commercial world. Selling the tool is a fools game - you sell access to a rental of the tool. Then you get recurring income, and can fuck over people who are firmly in your ecosystem.

I don't think that there are many subject areas for which that is true. Perhaps scientific research, but I struggle to think of others.

In any case, and to answer your question more directly, I believe that there's room for both philosophies in software. Things that were once cutting edge become foundational and free, or nearly so. And people are motivated to create novel things of commercial value that build "on the shoulders of giants".