Hacker News Reader

Aka commercial software. Nothing wrong with it indeed!

Just don’t package it with a weird “open” license and pretend it’s OSS. You can dual license if needed and deal with the consequences.

> And that's cool but to a very great degree these often boil down to an exchange of time for money

Isn’t that what all business interactions end up being in the end? Yes, it is a treadmill, but life itself is a treadmill. You need to keep feeding and sheltering yourself even though you JUST ate yesterday.

I don’t think planning to support yourself indefinitely for a short period of work is a healthy expectation. Do you really think you can provide enough value to the world in a few years to provide for yourself for your entire life?

Having to work consistently is the norm, not a treadmill.

> Isn’t that what all business interactions end up being in the end?

Only if you ignore capital. Many business interactions revolve around having access to or utilizing capital in some way. Renting and financing maybe the most obvious examples, but plenty of others too.

The key question is that can/should software be considered such capital asset? It being intellectual (or "imaginary" as some pundits put it), and not tangible, property.

Certainly one obvious example is that, given sufficient capital, I can give it to a wealth management person at a brokerage, give them some guidelines, and pretty much sit back.

You can also become a silent partner in some business where you collect a skim of the profits while someone(s) else do the work to make sure the business continues to produce profits.

I was answering the vein of someone who wants to put in a largely one-shot investment of time and continue to collect money over a subsequent period.

Capital is insanely cheap right now, and trying to get a good return on your investment is not easy.

Yes, you could be a silent partner in a business.... but you likely won't get great returns, and you risk losing it all of the company goes under.

The key is "sufficient capital" obviously. And, of course, it's all about diversification and rate of return. As you correctly note, being a silent partner in a business is riskier than a lot of the alternatives and, if it isn't a commensurately higher expected return, probably not a good idea.

However, given sufficient capital (what's sufficient depends on what sort of income stream you're looking for), largely passive investments in various forms can produce that. After all, that's what many people are looking for when they retire.

Yeah, any product/service, probably has at least some level of ongoing bug fixes, security patches, updates, etc. There are periodically threads on here about creating businesses that mostly just throw off revenue. And there are invariably people who created a nice income stream for a modicum of ongoing effort. But there are very few paths to spending time over a year or so to get to a significant income stream that's little more work than depositing customer payments.

> Having to work consistently is the norm, not a treadmill.

Agreed. Work is what creates value for others. However, trading one's work for money that's designed to loose value over time via the inflation tax central banks impose on us all is why so many hard working people feel they're on a treadmill that they can't get off. If our money functioned correctly as a tool to store value over time, people could work, save, and with frugal living could actually get ahead if their work consistently created value for their clients or customers. There are systemic monetary reasons why work often resembles a treadmill.

Only 20% of people in the USA have more than 10K in the bank. Savings losing money over time isn't relevant to most people, they are spending what they earn before it matters.

(and, btw, my point is not that people in the USA are spendthrifts. It's that most only make enough to support themselves).

Inflation has been so tiny for decades. And in fact, most Americans are in debt, so inflation HELPS them.

Deflationary currency would be a disaster for the economy.

The sale value of commercial software licenses stems from its supply being artificially constrained, which is only enabled by the monopoly granted by government. Exploiting that monopoly to limit access to the software to only those with pockets deep enough to pay for that privilege can indeed seen in a negative way.

I find it interesting. The reason it can be viewed negatively is that the production cost is zero for software. Nobody minds paying a reasonable price for an item that takes effort to make. But we know software can copied for free - barring deliberate schemes to prevent that.

Even many businesses consider product design a "cost center" and production/manufacturing a "profit center". I prefer to think of engineering as an investment in the future.

So "open source" as a business sounds to these people like the investment has already been done for free, and production is free, so we should be able to make massive profit! But they're not providing any value unless they add something significant.

>> And that's cool but to a very great degree these often boil down to an exchange of time for money

So you want to collect rent.

And businesses based on open source want to collect rent from the work other people have already done for free.

Sounds exactly like one of the reasons Free Software came along in the first place.

> And, if what you've created is of value to others, why shouldn't you charge them a fee to use it?

You can, but you probably won't succeed if it's open source, because people can share it around freely without your consent.

There is a middle way: license your software so that big players with more than (say) $1M revenue will have to pay for the development of the software, while the small guy can use the free version.

> because people can share it around freely without your consent.

The nice thing about this approach is that big players like FAANG can't really get around it. But it doesn't matter since your software is probably already a bargain for them (all these big companies are essentially built on open source).

Another approach is a source-available license.

The one I'm interested in would be one, where viewing, modifying, recompiling the source is allowed, but redistribution is allowed only to those who had bought the license from all owners of the source and it's modifications. It would produce a nice "waterfall" effect.

It wouldn't be open-source nor free software, but most people don't really need limitless redistribution, and the source would be proof that said software isn't malicious.

The real treadmill is the current monetary system. Even if you make a product, but revenue doesn't grow at least 15-20% YoY (the rate of money printing last year), its value is shrinking over time.

The real real treadmill is nature. Even if you eat today, you'll need more food tomorrow. How outrageous is that?!

I'm fine with eating the same amount of food. My body doesn't need 20% more food every year to get the same amount of nutrients out of it.