Ask HN: How to deal with this feeling of dissonance about selling software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to deal with this feeling of dissonance about selling software?

4 pointsvoussoir6 comments

This thread on the front page, "Anyone making a living building desktop applications?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30027925) hit me pretty hard, especially since I'm currently looking for a new job and struggling to decide what I want to do with life. Of course there are just as many projects that never break a hundred bucks, but seeing all these figures of hundreds to thousands per month on straightforward, no-nonsense software sales makes me feel like I'm wasting my potential.

But the dissonance part is that I'm standing on mountains upon mountains of free software, to the point that it feels difficult to justify selling any of the measly stuff I write. I don't think any other industry is like this. Linux is free. SQLite is free, it's even public domain. My feelings about SQLite are strong enough that I wrote about it last year (https://voussoir.net/writing/sqlite_what_a_hunk). I can't remember the last time I paid for software and I don't know how I could charge someone else for software without feeling like a big poser.

I already know the technical answer, which is that people will pay for something if it adds value to their life. So yeah, I get that. But the idea that my stupid code is worth money when I don't even pay for the stuff that improves my life is difficult to reconcile. You can visit my profile to see what I make.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks

Depends on who your target market is. People with a certain level of technical skill can take open source software and make it work for their own purposes. They generally won't pay.

But, the business owner, the average person in the street, they don't have the skills to read the documentation, to fiddle with the installation dependencies, etc. For them, paying for software that gets the job done is effectively paying somebody to do for them what they cannot do and are disinclined to do.

If you "just sell software" to those types of people then you need to make sure that it is very easy to install and get operating. That requires a lot of work and testing and even then you need to provide support. That is why you charge for software.

To give you an analogy, there are people who will buy an old car, fix it and be happy to drive it. They are not the same people who buy brand new luxury cars. The latter will probably never pop the hood. The former will frequent forums to share tuning and modification tips. Very different target markets.

Honestly, the biggest crime that F/OSS committed was to peddle the belief that a software engineers’ time is inherently less valuable than that of a civil engineer or a chemical engineer. And yes you can quibble that F/OSS isn’t to blame, it’s really the fault of corporations who profit off of the shoulders of giants! Well you are free to feel smug in your glass house while benefiting from all of the industries who don’t share your tightly held scruples (medicine, chemistry, aerospace etc.)

Just because precursors to my work didn’t feel it necessary to sell said work doesn’t mean i should feel bad for selecting a different course.

What comes around goes around? When you're young and needy, F/OSS is a godsend. You repay that debt when you transition to the sell side.

Software comes in two flavors, platform and end user. Platform software is usually free and only monetized via service contracts. Platform software is rarely used directly and instead is used to build other software. End user software is either subscription based or ad based now. Very few people buy end user software now as a single item.

As a developer you see the platform software, and that is causing the dissonance.

Thanks for your reply. But one reason the linked thread affected me so much is because many of the replies were not subscription or ad-based. Ad-based software does not impress me in the slightest. Many of them were B2B which I realize is a market more willing to spend than home users, but plenty of replies sounded like they refer to perpetual licenses sold to normal people.

> As a developer you see the platform software

Yes, that does account for linux / sqlite, but I'm also an end user of dozens / hundreds of applications, none of which I've paid for. At this point almost all of the software I install is free and open source on both desktop and mobile.

> I don't know how I could charge someone else for software without feeling like a big poser.

This is how every doctor, lawyer, banker, consultant, carpenter, mechanic, etc. feels about what they're billing for. I suggest you get over it.

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