Saying "That's too bad for them" while new billions are made on top is very Louis XVIth. The population at large will, eventually, try something to address this problem. It'd be nice to try to be on top of it early and handle it peacefully.
This ability for anyone to connect and share with thousands of other people exactly as we are now is exclusive to this internet platform. That is the driver of success, of innovation, of technology and future. Every other media, every other market, is prohibitive to newcomers. There's a reason that disrupting a market is so praised, because it is something most everyone who tries, fails.
On the Internet, in software, disruption is the name of the game. It's a brand new sandbox that anyone can play in.
If the government required anyone writing software to have a license, and a permit, and have the result be approved by an agency before it was distributed, there'd be orders of magnitude less people entering the business.
you can make your own chairs, furniture, oven, whatever...
its just easier to share your homemade products/code with the community over the internet, which makes software development look less regulated.
and you sure as hell won't be able to get a job outside of startups/web development without a license either.
That's why I mentioned "distribute".
> without a license
I don't know any software engineers who have a license, or that a permit is required, or government approval of any sort.
You can bake cookies for yourself all you want, no problem. Try and sell them, and you need to get permits, inspections, etc. Try and cut hair, you need a license.
i admit that i can't say anything beyond this though.
As for running my own software business, my only involvement with the government is registering the business and paying the taxes.
His company is doing extremely well. How is that possible? After companies use it for a while, they come back and are happy to buy a support contract rather than manage it themselves.
His business would not exist without open source software that his company developed.
I've had a few sales. Those plus support renewals make me about $25K/year. Consulting and custom software development augment my income.
Recently I was at a workshop, and found that actually many companies use my software. I had no idea it was so widely used. One even presented the results of some 60 CPU days spent using my software. They used the no-cost version, and had never considered paying me for it.
(I asked. They said they had no internal mechanism to give gifts to open source developers. I said I could offer them a PO. They said they would need to justify it. I said I had a new version with better performance and more capabilities. It was a frustrating conversation.)
I am not convinced that the open source, no cost, business model, where you hope that people are "happy to buy a support contract", will work for this combination of product and field. It may be that there simply aren't enough users in my field to support an open source company in the way you describe.
So while I know it works for some - as you said - I believe for me and this product, a non-free/open source license would make me more money than a free license.
I have a few concrete problems I've come across in selling free sofware.
Given that I distribute a software product, how do I provide an evaluation version of the newer, better library? Do I simply trust that they will either pay me or not use it? If they do use it anyway, do I shrug my shoulders and walk away?
How do I do market segmentation? That is, if a non-profit research site, or academic group, wants to use my software, do I give them a discount? But these are also the groups where some graduate student might look at it, see that it's open source, and put it on their github account.
Which is fine. I support them doing that. But I need to price things appropriately. So it's odd that I may need to charge more for academic groups than I do pharmaceutical company (pharma being my main customer base), because academic groups are riskier sales than pharmas.
Now, I could simply give it away at no cost, and hope there is enough support contract interest for the future. But I get the strong sense that people will do a one-off purchase to get the software even if they aren't willing to get a support contract after they download and start using it.
It's just a variation on give away the razor, sell the blades. Give away the music, sell the concert tickets. Open source enables reaching a much, much larger audience than would otherwise be possible, and at a much lower cost than doing advertising. (You also don't have to expend time and treasure dealing with piracy and the inevitable customer problems and anger with your DRM mechanism.) Another benefit is customers fix bugs and feed those back to you, so you've got a stronger product.
Another model for making money off of open source is using it as an advertisement delivery platform. We're all familiar with that stuff.
I also have a friend who expended a great deal of effort creating a very nice dev tool. He wanted to get paid for it, and made it closed source, pay only. An expensive marketing campaign is necessary to make that work (like what Coverity does), but he didn't have one. He made zero sales and was bitter about it.
I don't know your particular situation, and it might be worth a try for you to go pay-only. But be prepared to invest a lot in marketing.
As for the trust thing, my experience is that trusting customers works. Treat them as worthy of trust and respect, and they will respond likewise. Treat them with suspicion and DRM, and they'll live down to that expectation.
Yes, that is the problem.
The biggest conference in my field has ~200 people. There might be 10,000 people around the world who might ever use my software in one way or another.
They tend to work in one of the one to two hundred or so companies doing drug discovery cheminformatics.
A "small percentage" of 200 is only a handful of companies. That's not enough to make a living. Rather, in that case it's more profitable to do custom software development in that case than off-the-shelf software. Because (oddly) people are willing to pay more for special one-off solutions than general solutions.
While if 10% of the field was willing to pay me once, and the handful of companies willing to pay support, then that's good money.
> "Another benefit is customers fix bugs and feed those back to you, so you've got a stronger product."
I've heard that a lot. I've also been doing free software in this field for 20 years. I've only ever received a handful of minor bug fixes.
My users are computational chemists and their IT support staff. They are not professional programmers. It's easier for them to pay me money to fix bugs than for them to do it.
Also, at some pharmas, code needs to be reviewed by the lawyers before being sent out.
I know one company that distributed source under the GPL, then found that their customers weren't willing to upgrade. Because they had made local changes, and found it too difficult to go through the lawyer review in order to send the changes upstream. It was easier for them to ask for new features instead.
> "advertising delivery platform"
Sure, and in-app sales. Except my software works on proprietary chemical compounds. I don't have access to the machines or the data, and no pharma in their right mind will allow me that sort of control of their in-house informatics platform.
> be prepared to invest a lot in marketing.
I wish to clarify that I am not looking to make my software proprietary. My argument is that I'm sure I could make more money with proprietary software than with free software.
Even if I make it proprietary, customers will get full source, no DRM, and the right to redistribute after (say), 10 years.
As for marketing, and as I found out, most people know of my software, and already use it. The problem is one of conversion less than marketing. Which is still a form of marketing, but less expensive.
> trusting customers works
So, one potential lead said they might buy my software. I gave them my list price. They said they didn't have the money to pay full price so could they get it for only $10K? This London-based organization has a full-time cheminformatics staff member, and over $100M in funding. I don't know if I should trust them, but I suspect it's a negotiating tactic.
Again, my point isn't to say that open source is a bad approach. I agree that there are business models where it does work. But it's not a panacea.
> I suspect it's a negotiating tactic.
Of course it is!
Do I trust them to undercut the price I think is reasonable? Do I trust them to tell me what the software is really worth to them? Do I trust that they will value my time appropriately?
That's why I have a problem with the word "trust" in this context.
Trust does not mean they won't negotiate hard to get the best deal they can. Trust does not mean they are obliged to show you their cards. Trust does not mean they value your time as you would.
I suspect you'll be very disappointed if you consider the latter to be trust issues.
Instead, trust is a highly multi-dimensional, culturally context-dependent concept. As such, I get little guidance from the phrase "trusting customers works", when I know that each aspect of trust has its own set of parameters, including some where I have no experience to guide me.
1. Commercial license, no support: pay $/£/€ amount
2. Commercial license with support: pay $/£/€ amount
By commerical use, I mean companies or academic insitutions. Option 1 is cheaper, but presumably more than affordable for companies who want to use the software.
I guess what I'm saying is that even when the software is open source, can you stipulate that payment is required if used by a commerical company or academic institution? Some companies may not pay, but I'm guessing many other companies will be happy to pay for option 1. Or am I being hopelessly naive?
There are a few reasons: 1) they want to support new feature development, 2) they want to support me personally, or 3) they want support with understanding the API or doing integration.
I think most F/OS software has lousy documentation. I think that's because developers rarely like to write documentation, because free documentation writers are rare as hen's teeth, and because users aren't willing to pay for documentation.
Which is great if you want to sell your consulting services as well. That is, if the tool solves a problem, but is a hassle to use, then you get paid for configuration and customization. But that disincentivizes putting together a solid API with extensive documentation, where people don't need your help to understand how everything works.
> "even when the software is open source, can you stipulate that payment is required if used by a commerical company or academic institution?"
There are two issues. First, for the software to be open source, then there can be no legal mechanism to require later payment. What you propose is not "open source".
That said, it's might be possible to have a side agreement which does that. That agreement might not be legally enforceable, but a company will likely comply anyway, because they made the agreement in the first place.
But there's no way I'll obligate an academic group to pay me $20K should one of the grad students, or student with access to the shared disk, decide to redistribute it, after seeing that it's under an open source license. There's no way that will do me any long-term good.
Also the fact that software/computing is so much a game changer for so many industries has much more to do with the growth rate and wealth generation, than the fact that there is little government regulation. Software grows everywhere, even in communist/socialist countries.
My understanding of the details is almost nonexistent, but I gather that there was some kind of statistical wizardry that let lenders load up a bunch of crappy mortgages into a package that was, in aggregate, supposedly an extremely safe investment with a very attractive return. These securities became the primary product, with the mortgages themselves being the raw material. The market demanded that production increase, so the lenders did the finance equivalent of drilling for tar sands oil. At this point there was no need for the government to mandate subprime mortgages. Lenders weren't just grudgingly implementing policy, they were enthusiastic, shouting from the rooftops for people to apply for mortgages even if they thought they wouldn't qualify. I clearly remember Countrywide's motto: "No one can do what Countrywide can". I guess it turned out that Countrywide couldn't do it either.
Wasn't it already made better with socialism? Do you not believe that things like ARPANET significantly contributed to the successes we have today?
It's like saying if engineers had wheels and engines laying around everywhere, nobody would have thought of connecting them together and making a car without a government grant. (I can tell you for a fact that the first thing any engineer does with an engine and wheels is find a way to put them together!)
The Arpanet also kinda went nowhere until the restrictions on commercial use of it were lifted.
But they didn't. I mean, if government projects lag behind private sector projects, why didn't we have ARPANET going nowhere while some private sector project jumped ahead? Even if you think we would have gotten their eventually (debatable), we can at the very least say that the government project got us there sooner.
Local networks run on the Ethernet protocol, developed by Xerox, and shows that an excellent network protocol does not require a government grant. And without Ethernet, there would have been Token Ring by IBM, or Token Bus by GM.
I find this a very parochial, US-centered statement. Many countries have these industries in greater regulation, and fare well in them. The conclusion I draw from the situation in the US is that its political structure, existing political-industrial relationships and the interests of its politicians are co-responsible for dysfunction in these industries, and not the general idea of government intervention.
As for why we don't see equal innovation outside of the US, I think the availability of human capital adequately explains it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Dimensional_Man
Yes it's nice having cheap super cool toys. It's nicer having less work and being treated well. But when a social economy interacts with human behavior it usually does not work out that way. But the above, having less work and having more free time, however you do it, is a worth goal for the economy. However you make it happen. Toys are not all that they are made out to be especially when you have no time to play with them.
That's all Capitalism I think is doing for us these days. Most methods of producing necessary things are so well understood and so efficient you can run them off machines for the most part. Capitalism is producing really cool toys for everyone. Yay!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_materialism
"Studies in the United States have found that an increase in material wealth and goods in the country has had little to no effect on the well-being and happiness of its citizens."
What people need are experiences and those experiences are all about having the time to experience them.
"Instead, research shows that purchases made with the intention of acquiring life experiences such as going on a family vacation make people happier than purchases made to acquire material possessions such as a car. Even just thinking about experiential purchases makes people happier than thinking about material ones"
It's sort of sick that this idea that you need free time has been turned into the above analysis about purchasing experiences.
And look at the results: an ongoing, decades long explosion of new products, innovation, millions earning a great living, costs of software relentlessly driven to literally zero, revolutionary new technology every couple of years - does anyone think that could be made better with socialism?
On the other hand, the industries with the most government intervention seem to be doing the worst - finance, health care, higher education.