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Comment by profeta | Hacker News Reader

you forgot they are running a multi trillion dollar industry on free-as-in-beer software.

I doubt they would pay $5 per user. or even a <your yearly salary> year flat fee.

and since they will not pay, you will have to run it on ads. And supporting online/mobile offerings (that do not have their requirement of local client/local logs) will always give you more money.

it is a lose/lose situation.

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No need to make them pay or support it with ads. Keep offering it to them for free and make a killing front-running them on commodities trades. Or just trade regular stocks since the whole market seems to move based on the crude prices. Either way, it should be pretty easy for a hedge fund to make way more money from eavesdropping than it costs to run the service.

It would be a good way to teach an industry with plenty of money the virtue of paying for mission-critical services. Given that the industry runs on a service like Yahoo's, it's a pretty good bet that you could slip an innocuous looking change to the privacy policy past them.

I'm sure they can't wait to begin using a chat service that not only has no qualms reading their private communications, but actively undermines their business as well.

That's the whole point. They need to learn the point contracts, SLAs and all that goes along with paying for mission critical software. The fact that they haven't been taken advantage of as I suggested is only due to the benevolence of the provider. If Messenger was bought by an entity that was not so benevolent, they'd learn the value of paying for their mission critical tools very quickly. Because what they're doing now is irresponsible given how much money is involved.

While tech will eventually reach there, today is not the day that deceit becomes an acceptable business plan.

There is a huge range of billion dollar tech companies whose past disagrees with you. Consider all those deseptive titles / adds / business plans ...

Yeah, this is the oil business, not the finance industry. Way more honorable.

I'd be willing to bet they'd pay for a seamless transition to a service that lets them keep their username, contact list, has the same UI, and basically works the same way as it did before.

> you forgot they are running a multi trillion dollar industry on free-as-in-beer software.

Isn't that the basis of enterprise linux?

Linux is free-as-in-speech software. That means I could clone it in a week and sell a competing product when, say Ubuntu, starts to implode. Free-as-in-beer software doesn't have that.

I think this is a false dichotomy, Linux is both free as in beer (unless you choose to pay for it) and free as in speech.

You're right it's not a dichotomy, but the property free-as-in-speech is the one that helps here, free-as-in-beer doesn't matter either way in this case (besides it's initial popularity).

There's a big difference between relying on a self-hosted product vs. a remote-hosted one. If your self-hosted software is suddenly no longer available, you have plenty of time to come up with a migration strategy, while you continue to use the obsolete product. If Yahoo Messenger went away, it would immediately disrupt business for all who rely on it.

Not to mention that any enterprise Linux user worth their salt has an expensive support contract with a major vendor (such as Red Hat). Either that, or they're confident that they have the in-house resources to support it. No enterprise user considers Linux to be "free as in beer", by any stretch of the imagination; rather, they're using it because it's the right tool for the job.

Why do you assume this? How much do you think the industry collectively pays to consultancies each year?

The Slack/GitHub model is to sell visibility to the company. X of your employees are using this, do you want to know how? Do you want an SLA? PCI compliance? $100k/yr.

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