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Comment by billpatrianakos | Hacker News Reader

I'm so glad they wrote about piracy and made the points about how Not all software should be free. Honestly, I'll never understand that sense of entitlement people have. I was once in the same boat as the author, pirating everything under the sun. Then I got a job writing code too and I haven't pirated a single thing since. I don't sell software but I appreciate the work that goes into it and understand that these guys lose out even if I didn't have money to pay to begin with. The no money argument and the free marketing arguments are bunk. The poor will save to buy if there's no pirate copy and the majority of marketing you get from a pirated app is marketing that links to the pirate download, not the legit one!

Excellent post!

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I've been wondering if independent software vendors might benefit from some humanizing of the sales effort. Instead of charging $2 for an app, how about framing it as "buy the developer a taco", or for $4 "buy the developer a grande latte". The amazing $10 app could be "buy the developer a roll of sushi". You get the idea.

Psychologically, I find it much more satisfying to be rewarding friends & associates with more tangible things than some dollar amount.

Does anyone know if this model has been attempted before?

Personally, I find it quite humiliating to have to (almost literally) beg for food just to be paid for work done, which in every single other aspect of life is considered perfectly normal.

Plus, how much does it really help? There are so many people with 'donate' buttons on their website who don't get enough 'donations' each year to even eat a single meal.

This is exactly the opposite of the pricing psychology ISVs benefit from. Good anchors for pricing are not cheap, disposable items but rather expensive, valuable economic inputs like "your fully loaded cost for $TIME."

I know a dev or two with "buy me a beer" buttons. Anecdotally, one of those buttons plus $5 will buy you a beer.

It flips it around to begging and belittling the time spent.

A far better proposition is just charging what you think it is worth and advertising the benefits to the buyer. Telling the buyer you're going to get a sushi roll doesn't assist them. Telling them they save x hours a week, or avoid situation y - now that's better marketing.

Thanks. I should have thought about the other angle of this. Mostly I was fascinated with the fun possibilities.

Because the item is a copy, and (digital) copies actually do cost nothing. That is just the physical fact, and people will always have some underlying sense of it -- as they should.

The idea that you should not be allowed to make copies, but must pay for them, is very unnatural. Humans are evolved to copy and share information -- that is the most effective behaviour. The problem is not people's inclinations, the problem is copyright/IP. You possibly can make some case that IP is a net positive system (although no-one seems to have found any evidence), but nevertheless, its essential structure/mechanism is intrinsically problematic.

Lots of ideas, and yet you completely miss the point.

You're not even talking about the same thing: the parent talks about piracy from an ethical point of view. Meanwhile, you reply with the physical point of view, saying the item is an exact duplicate that cost nothing to produce.

Representation doesn't mean a damn thing. It doesn't justify behavior.

Anything digital is inherently valueless. There is no cost to copy it. In a perfectly free market, it would be completely valueless. It is only given value by our legal system of copyright laws.

I say this as a software developer and one who is not libertarian in the least.

> Anything digital is inherently valueless. There is no cost to copy it.

Wouldn't books, then, only be "worth" the cost of the paper on which they're printed? How does making something digital automatically destroy any inherent value?

Sorry, I meant price where I said value and now can't edit it.

But look at it this way, for anything digital the supply is infinite. We currently have legal methods of restricting the supply and some attempts at software or digital methods of restricting it. But even so, the difficulty we've had stamping out illegal piracy is a testament to how artificial and fragile these methods are. With truly infinite supply, the price will always be zero. Why should I pay for something I can create copies of with 'cntrl+c' and 'cntrl+v' ? The only thing that leads me to pay for basically anything is that I can't simply recreate it on my own. The day 3D printers reach the versatility of Star Trek replicators is the day a price based market economy will collapse completely. With infinite supply, there's no need to pay for anything.

Bullshit. Free market or not, that's an entirely one dimensional view on the value of software. Plenty of software has value -- the software that makes a business more productive, competitive or saves it money has inherent value, not to mention applications in other areas.

Competent business owners, managers and technical people making decisions about the implementation of software are very interested in the value of that software and its value to business is exactly why we have an economy that exchanges money for these things.

I wasn't just talking about software. I was talking about movies, books, music, images, anything that can be digitized. As soon as it's digital, there's a nearly infinite supply. Unless you can find a way to limit that supply the price (sorry, I meant price when I said value) will drop to zero. We currently have legal methods of limiting that supply -- by giving the creator legal control of how digital things get copied. But the difficulty of stamping out piracy even with these legal counter-measures is a testament to how artificial that really is.

There are some cases where it is possible to limit the supply of digital goods, and this is best seen in software where access to the code can be limited or the code can be written to be restricted in some way, especially in compiled software or web applications. But this, too, can often be hacked.

Note, I'm no fan of free markets. I think they are an enormously clumsy tool for linking 'price' to 'value'.

Fair enough. I really thought you were advocating something else.

(By 'value' you mean 'price' -- copies certainly have value, but they just have a near zero market price, ideally.)

Fair. Thank you for the correction. But I think this is, personally, one of my problems with free market economics. It conflates value and price too much. If you make a piece of software, or music, or a book and cannot control it's being copied, then how can a market assign value to it? The price is zero. Period. It's free. Unless you can somehow prevent it from being copied. And even with the restrictions of law, we've seen that that is nearly impossible.

The only reason price based markets even work for any other sort of exchange is because there is limited supply. With anything digital the supply is inherently unlimited.

Then what does justify behaviour?

Ethics is grounded in physical reality, that is sort-of where the buck stops -- at least it seems a better place than anywhere else. Surely an ethical evalution of an act depends on what the act is.

What makes an act bad? If, for example, you say stealing is bad, and are asked why, you can reply that someone loses something -- they could do things with it before, but no longer can. There is a sense of harm, in basic physical terms that we can all pretty much agree upon, simply because we all share the same basic physical condition.

But what if it were possible to steal something without taking anything away from someone -- i.e. the basic physical effect is different. Is that still bad? In what way could it be? You could just institute a rule proscribing such an act anyway, and so breaking the rule might seem bad superficially. But that would be like ruling that no-one can go out in the sun on wednesdays -- surely at some point someone will ask why. And there would not seem to be a good answer.

That is the way copying is different from taking. Because, at bottom, it does not do anything harmful, and is in fact positive. And that is why people are probably likely to have some underlying sense that copying is morally OK.

> And there would not seem to be a good answer.

Sure there will, but it depends on whether you are empathetic to the condition of other human beings. A small software vendor sells their product. In effect, they're saying, either pay for a piece of software, or do without it. I could violate that contract, but then I'd be an asshole, because they asked for payment, yet I went and took it without paying.

I wish to treat other human beings with respect, especially creators. I may hate copyright, but that doesn't mean I take it out on creators. Their works enrich my life in ways I never would have imagined, and I'm pleased to be able to support them. Jason Fried of 37Signals had a quote recently where he mentioned that, in the case of good products, people are happy to pay for them.

"Because the item is a copy, and (digital) copies actually do cost nothing. That is just the physical fact, and people will always have some underlying sense of it -- as they should."

So why don't people have the same mindset about currency?

It's just ink and paper that represents a perceived value...very similar to the way digital items work.

How about art? It's just paint and paper.

Digital copies may cost nothing, but the original usually costs thousands of man-hours and or lots of money.

"The idea that you should not be allowed to make copies, but must pay for them, is very unnatural"

In the programming community, it seems only unnatural when it involves proprietary software. If a company uses GNU software without giving back to the community (the currency involved with OSS), people here want heads to roll. Just look at any discussion here in HN that involved the thesis theme. Many, many people called him a "thief" and that he "stole" code from Wordpress. In reality, nothing was "stolen" (using your logic).

Your mindset will eventually cause the following:

1) Developer wages will decrease over time 2) Most companies will just have a web service as opposed to an app. It means you will be paying a monthly fee for software and it will cost more to the end-user in the long-run.

Isn't that why Software-as-a-Service is much more palatable to a purchaser? It feels like your company is actually doing something for the money spent.

If you were to sell the software as a download, people would demand lower prices, since 'after all' they're doing all the work (and hosting is cheap). It's an interesting dichotomy.

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