Hacker News Reader

Comment by beyondcompute | Hacker News Reader

One of the most influential and interesting articles to me that I share with all the developers with whom I think I can have an interesting conversation (and it influences some quite a lot)!

I remember there were some comments: > Are you prepared to pay 10x for a text editor, say? My answer: Hell yeah, if I am earning thousands using this editor, why not pay couple hundred bucks for a really well-made program with good support, etc.

But as I understand, there exists no demand for this type of thing among general users. People are ready to pay for tons of useless features being added (just to signal that the project is progressing) but not ready to pay for simpler solutions that are really focused on quality, security and consistent performance.

View on HN

I think there is demand for those things, but commercial entities are poorly equipped to provide them. The entire growth mindset is antithetical to providing a stable and consistent product. Product tiers get introduced to extract more money though upselling, creating an inherently adversarial relationship between the company and end users who end up with an intentionally crippled product. As the company gets larger, the incentive structure surrounding middle management takes over and completely wrecks the product as individuals compete to game internal metrics. Unnecessary and regressive changes make their way into updates because "product launches" look good on people's resumes. Nobody cares what changes were actually made because they arent incentivised to. Add innevitable attempts at vendor lock-in / weaponization of the sunk cost falacy against customers and it makes perfect sense that most non-crap software (that also remains non-crap as time goes on) seems to be open source.

Maybe we need a patreon style system for providing long term stable funding to important open source projects. I would sleep easier knowing that FOSS developers for packages i use will have stable income and be able to continue their work.

Nicely said! I myself prefer the small-businesses’ products. Like several-person organizations that provide “underdo the competition” or “do one thing and do it well” type of software. But I agree on how “bureaucracy” and political games inside larger organizations lead to introduction of not-always-sensical features or re-designs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com