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Comment by codewiz | Hacker News Reader

> This is just fundamentally not true or else all software would be sold for next to nothing.

How much have you spent on purchasing software this year?

For the past 15 years, pretty much 100% of the code running on my personal laptop and work desktop is opensource. The few remaining non-opensource programs, such as UEFI and wifi firmware, came free of charge with the hardware.

The only software I directly purchased in this decade are videogames on Steam, and that's closer to purchasing artwork than a computer program.

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> For the past 15 years, pretty much 100% of the code running on my personal laptop and work desktop is opensource.

I'm 100% open source at home as well and I'd say we are a tiny minority. No job that I've had was open source-centric so you have me beat there.

> The few remaining non-opensource programs, such as UEFI and wifi firmware, came free of charge with the hardware.

Nothing comes free of charge with hardware. The price was included with the hardware. Did you pay for your smartphone? Or you get that free?

> The only software I directly purchased in this decade are videogames on Steam, and that's closer to purchasing artwork than a computer program.

You bought ( leased ) software. Doesn't matter how you want to rationalize it to fit your argument.

This is actually a good example of my point. The important part is not the marginal cost to produce the software, it is the value it creates for the user.

As a salaried employee, there isn't much software out there that can either increase my income or decrease my expenses, so most of my personal software purchases end up being for leisure. However, software does provide tremendous value to my employer. As a result, they are willing to spend millions on it annually.

In the example of selling an AGI product, why bother selling it to me for whatever the maximum price I could afford? I'm not going to put a mortgage on the house to buy it because it won't allow me to maximize income by working 10 salaried positions or anything like that. But my employer could save millions with it and therefore they would be willing to spend millions to buy it.

> How much have you spent on purchasing software this year?

I work with tooling that costs on the order of $100k/seat. We don't get many add-ons, or it would be worse. You don't seem to understand how industrial software works. Negotiations involve the vendor figuring out how much your company is worth, and charging the largest fraction of that possible. The number of vendors in a niche is extremely small and they all work the same way.

> How much have you spent on purchasing software this year?

A few billion.

I bought a licence to Windows source code and paid developers to remove tracking so that I can have an OS with functional UX and privacy.

I bought Google search, removed ads, banned all the SEO spam from AdWords and now I can finally have a functional seatch experience.

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