Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for posting this, a thousand times. It really clearly illuminates precisely why in open source the interests of the user and the developer are fundamentally differently aligned than in commercial software. Not miss-aligned necessarily, but differently aligned.

In open source the developer has the power, they get to decide what they work on and nobody can tell them otherwise. The best a user can do is post a begging letter in a bug tracker. It doesn't matter what the user thinks, even a majority of users, all they can do is ask.

In commercial software it's the user putting bread on the developer's table. The user feeds and clothes the developer's children, and/or pays for their supply of mountain dew. If the user wants something, bye and large they get it, or at least they have a pretty solid chance of it more often than not. A vote for a feature speaks a lot more convincingly when it's backed up by a wallet.

There's nothing wrong with open source or free and libre software. It's great, I love it, but a lot of it's proponents seem to think proprietary software is some sort of crime and genuinely don't understand why proprietary software dominates so completely in so many domains outside of IT infrastructure.

If you don't have the skills to make the open-source changes you want yourself, but you have the money to make it happen, there is nothing stopping you hiring a developer to build the patch that you need. I don't know of a reliable way to do that with proprietary software.

I've worked for two ISVs who's business model was partly based on exactly this. Their customers would directly fund the development of custom features they needed. The first company developed cellular radio network planning software, the other developed business middleware.

> there is nothing stopping you hiring a developer to build the patch that you need

unless it's accepted upstream, you've got an ongoing maintenance problem on your hands. getting an idea in isn't always just about time/resources/money. if your idea doesn't fit their 'vision', it won't be accepted, regardless of how much you have funded your feature. do you now take on maintaining a fork? sometimes the answer might be 'yes', but I suspect in most cases it's going to be 'no'.

And the decade-plus-old bugs I've filed on Google's various tools say what?

(I've given up either reporting bugs or, where at all possible, using their software, as it's abundantly clear my interests and theirs are not in the least aligned.)

How much did you pay Google? Thanks for lending support to my argument that paying for software is the best way to ensure the user and developer's interests are aligned.

Even if you pay annual maintenance fee with 4 or 5 zeros at the end, your bugs are going to be ignored, especially if they are feature requests.

If they are critical bugs, they might or might not be addressed.

Some people pay for Google apps on a custom domain ($12/month exactly), but I don't expect Google to even answer the phone since that's small change for you.

At a certain scale (much smaller than Google's, probably already at about 100 customers) it's impossible to please _all_ users of your software, so you try to please the majority. And whatever you change, there will always be that 'one guy' whose workflow will break.

You were specifically contrasting open-source and proprietary (commercial) software.

The Google model dominates the proprietary world presently, and even long-term shrinkwrap / clickwrap vendors such as Microsoft are shifting in whole or part to advertising-supported software.

What I pay for Google software is indirect, but given a roughly $100 billion global spend on online advertising, allocated largely among the world's richest 1 billion people, that amounts to about $100/year for the privilege of tools which frustrate rather than delight me.

As I've described in "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", odds are strong that mass-market software of any stripe, including proprietary whether paid, subscription, or advertising-supported, will fail to address power-user / elite-user interests:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

Good luck convincing a commercial software developer to apply the changes you want. It's rare that a company, commercial or not, changes software because of what customers want (marketing department koolaid doesn't apply).

Developers know best, even when they don't, because they're the ones doing the actual work. But in the FOSS ecosystem you have: i) the freedom to do the changes yourself ii) the freedom to offer help with design, documentation, ideas iii) a public bug tracking and issues manager

Let me know when you can do this commercially.

On a tangent: it is indeed a crime to use commercial software when there are libre alternatives; every use moves the needle one tick deeper towards Eternal September

Is it also a crime to create and sell software, even if that's the only path available to you that will result in the product you see a need for?

You answered yourself with your own question, best regards

> Developers know best, even when they don't, because they're the ones doing the actual work.

For me, a large part of the fun of being a developer is enabling others to do stuff they otherwise couldn't. As such we absolutely entertain feature requests and similar, and implement a lot of them.

When sales come back from a sales presentation laughing and telling of jaws hitting the floor, it's almost always due to features that started as a suggestion from one of our users.

Very often though the feature requests are trying to solve XY problems. Often there's a better route to achieving what the user wants, which almost always is some way of avoiding redundant work or other workflow simplifications.

Us devs often do know best when it comes to edge cases and limitations, and about other use-cases that this particular user haven't considered.

However most requests are born from something real, so we will usually inquire what the user is after, in an effort to determine the impact and alternate routes. I might even contact other customers who I know use that module or have a similar work flow and ask them what they think.

And based on that implement changes that make the program better not just for that user but for all our customers.

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