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Comment by randlet | Hacker News Reader

You can sell a library just as well as any other piece of software I think.

Not really. Your market is different. Instead of selling to business managers seeking to solve a problem, you're selling to developers. Developers tend to like solving problems themselves, and you're competing versus free.

The definition being used here for libraries and services has both being marketed to developers. We're talking about APIs, not a web product with a UI etc.

Services, in this article, doesn't refer to things that can only be built as services (e.g. because it queries a proprietary dataset) but those that might optionally be built as services (e.g. fetching and processing otherwise accessible data) and could, as easily, be built as a library.

There's an ecosystem of paid libraries and tools around Java and C#. While developers might like to solve problems of their own, standards compliance is one place that they likely wouldn't want to tread their own path if they can help it. They've got work to do, and deadlines.

On the Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Apple and Google developer ecosystems there are plenty of shops selling libraries.

Basically where most devs selling commercial software live on.

You can totally sell libraries to business managers. You can sell sauteed rat's assholes on a stick to business managers, you just need the right sales pitch.

Stealing a library is easier than stealing a service.

Yes. I suppose it’s the same with installable software. But it sells anyway.

One example of this is computer games. There are games like StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, where server is required even for solo-playing and it's not possible to play offline. I think that one of the reasons is to make it harder to crack a game (as you would need to re-implement server) and to make a cracked game objectively worse (as your implementation will not be as polished).

And a crime in both cases.

https://www.bsa.org/

> And a crime in both cases.

Including a stolen library you in commercial software that you distribute is easy to do but also easy to detect, so it only means that you're willing to pay a triple of the price in damages.

Now you're in the business of policing your users. Not fun if what you like to do is solving problems with code.

For example gamedev middleware is an example of that - be it individual library, for example audio: fmod, criware, wwise, miles, etc., or full blown game enines (unity, unreal, etc.). Just few examples.

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