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Comment by VincentEvans | Hacker News Reader

Personally, in the past I never had a problem with paying a reasonable price for software if I end up “owning” it as the result of the payment, allowing me to use it in perpetuity. I especially liked some products that came with “lifetime updates”, eg FL Studio, where a purchase entitles you to future updates providing bug fixes and new features free of charge. I also like Jetbrains subscription model that allows me to use the current version forever even if I stop paying subscription.

But as the time went on - more and more restrictions were put on the purchase: can’t install on multiple computers in a household, the key cannot be reused when reinstalling, immediate absolution when continuous operation requires paid updates, and finally - full on subscriptions that don’t result in ownership. As the result of all this my desire to buy software ran out.

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I’d be fine with just “let me run the software in perpetuity”, ideally without automated updates. Software that matters enough for me to pay for is going to become part of my workflow, and a tool in my toolbox. I don’t want my tools disappearing or changing arbitrarily.

I’ve always seen software development and maintenance as a service. The idea of free lifetime updates always struck me as unsustainable. Having a reasonable bug-fix and free update lifetime for a given version doesn’t strike me as unfair.

A company offering free lifetime updates raises a red flag in my mind re: their long-term viability.

In case of FL Studio - there’s a core product that remains free and receives updates, and there various add-ons and content that you can pay for if you choose to.

It’s not all that different to how some game producers continue to update and bug-fix the game, as well as on occasion introduce new features - while releasing expansions that you need to pay for if you want to play it. Example - Diablo 3 which saw 3 or 4 expansions since it was released a decade or so ago. Or Fallout 4.

That model obviously works for some - and the makers of FL Studio celebrated their 20th anniversary a while ago. One of the benefits to them - is that they don’t need to support old versions of their software, all customers have the latest version available to them free of charge.

Rant:

If you let people install the software easily, they'll just pirate and won't buy the software. If you lock things down you'll irritate people and they won't buy the software. If you make it open source they'll just build it themselves and won't buy the software. If you make it open source with a license that restricts commercial use (or is even too copyleft e.g. AGPL) people will bash you for having a "non-free license" and won't buy the software.

There's really only one method that's working broadly: SaaS. The cloud is the ultimate DRM. You don't even give people the binaries or their own data. You keep it in the cloud and charge rent.

SaaS works. People won't buy software that they can run themselves, but they'll rent it and give up all privacy and control of their own data.

SaaS even lets you pretend to be open source by "supporting open source" (tossing a few bucks in sponsorships or employing one or two open source authors) or having an open source client for a closed source SaaS platform. Nobody seems to care about that. They just look at the license on the source, not the holistic picture of the ecosystem that it works within. At the same time you can build your SaaS on the shoulders of open source, using all those dumb hippies as free labor.

I love making software but I absolutely despise the way this market works. It's completely perverse.

It's hard to make money in software by doing things to make peoples' lives better or increase their freedom. It's easy to make money with rent extraction schemes, addictionware, dark patterns, and outright scams. It's like this market is full of people who want to be screwed and refuse to pay for anything that doesn't screw them.

The reality is that we painted ourselves into a corner with free-as-in-beer, "information wants to be free," etc. without considering how incentives work in large systems. You get what you incentivize. By making anything that is pro-user and pro-human free (as in beer) and educating the customer base to expect it to be free, you remove all incentive and resource base for the development of that kind of software. The only incentives left are for things that make the world a worse place. The best way to make money is to con, dark-pattern, lock in, addict, surveil, or outright scam the user.

I've spent years trying to build useful software. I'm not doing too bad. I've somehow made it work. But with the same knowledge that underlies my current work (cryptography, distributed systems, network protocols, infosec) I could have become incredibly rich scamming people in cryptocurrency or doing dozens of other shady-but-not-illegal (or illegal-but-hard-to-prosecute) things.

Half the time I'm proud of not doing those things. The other half the time I feel like a big fat sucker.

"The reality is that we painted ourselves into a corner with free-as-in-beer, "information wants to be free," etc."

Personally I kind of view it the other way around. We weren't the painters here, just observers. "Information wants to be free" is phrased that way because, whether we want it to be or not, it is just a fundamental fact that it is very easy to copy bits. And - while you can make it damn annoying to be sure - if you want a user to be able to see the bits on their screen, there is going to be a way to break DRM. So - we can either acknowledge this, embrace reality, and figure it out from there, or we can shove our heads in the sand and wave our arms about yelling "intellectual property!!" and ask the local monopoly on violence to help us do so.

I agree that SaaS is often used to skirt the piracy stuff. I also agree that SaaS encouraging you to give up ownership of your data is bad. But also I think SaaS being on the other side of a network forces a function that's actually useful - they're assuming the risk, the ops burden, and so on. You get to just shoot IP packets at them, which I find is typically a comfortable position to be in. And frequently I find that that is actually why SaaS is so valuable. Part of the reason that enterprises pay for SaaS is because it lets them offload business complexity, operational burden, etc. So i think SaaS isn't just a categorical moral hazard.

"It's hard to make money in software by doing things to make peoples' lives better or increase their freedom. It's easy to make money with rent extraction schemes, addictionware, dark patterns, and outright scams. It's like this market is full of people who want to be screwed and refuse to pay for anything that doesn't screw them."

This is absolutely an accurate take on the current B2C software ecosystem. If it's not B2B software, it's probably predatory in at least some way. And if it's not "productivity" software, it's probably a literal horror of bad actors. Humans just weren't ready to have nightmare rectangles in their pockets 24/7 and our monkey brains are far too easy to game into exchanging money for dopamine microdoses at far too egregious of an exchange rate.

These are good points, but I disagree somewhat about the ops burden issue of SaaS. The ops burden issue is due to problems that are all solvable, and if people paid for software there would be a strong incentive to solve them. Instead we've revived the technicians in white coats tending a mainframe model because that turns out to be what people will pay for, and I think this is mostly because the model doesn't give them other options.

Edit: also while there is a marketing distinction between B2C and B2B ultimately everything is B2C. B2B is just B2C at least one level removed.

It is definitely true that the safest-for-user model is to use web software - it's the most secure sandbox that's commonly available and has good hardware access. The safest-for-company model to monetize is SaaS. It kind of makes sense that we are where we are.

There's a perverse dislike of delivering software over the web because we want binaries, but the same is true with hardware. You only license the proprietary hardware, so you can't do anything with it. The fact that it's a physical object you hold is purely how it's delivered.

We see companies that protect revenues while charging users for real services as somehow criminal. I spend about $100 per month on various subscriptions and I feel I benefit from those services immensely! I don't like not having MP3s which I can hold and copy, but I also like having all of the Spotify library to enjoy. It's all trade offs.

> It's like this market is full of people who want to be screwed and refuse to pay for anything that doesn't screw them.

This market and every market, people don't value things they can get for free.

When money is spent emotions get involved and so does sunk-cost fallacy, tricking us into believing the thing is worth more.

That's part of it too. We have unintentionally devalued truly user-focused software.

> If you let people install the software easily, they'll just pirate and won't buy the software. If you lock things down you'll irritate people and they won't buy the software.

Baked in DRM platforms like App Stores, Steam, etc. seem to be reasonably effective at blocking casual piracy (at least during launch windows) without becoming completely unusable. Some of the DRM pain is compensated for by the convenience of somewhat streamlined access to your software library on multiple devices, with relatively easy download and installation. This doesn't scale well though if you have more than a couple of app launchers/installers to deal with.

Game stores tend to have the nice feature that you can log in on any PC or console and immediately get access to your software library.

Something I'm less enthusiastic about is games (Diablo 4) that require an internet connection even in single player mode (and even if you "own" the physical game disc.)

As a customer I'm not a huge fan of DRM, but as a developer I'm probably OK with outsourcing it to Apple, Valve, Nintendo or whoever as long as it doesn't create usability nightmares.

Jetbrains doesn't allow you to use the current version forever if you stop paying. It allows you to use the version YOU CURRENTLY FULLY PAID FOR, which is a year old version. That's a very clever trick, and also shows that in the end it's really just about providing a feel-good factor.

I misused the word “current” to mean the version as of the time of the purchase.

I don’t consider it a trick at all and am not sure why being able using something that was perfectly usable when you bought it is “a trick” as soon as a newer version of that thing comes out?

I see you still don't get how it works. There are two options:

You buy it outright. Then this version belongs to you, and there are no subscriptions.

Or, you buy a subscription. After 12 months, you are using the current version of Jetbrains, and the version from 12 MONTHS AGO belongs to you forever. With a subscription, the version belonging to you will always be 12 months older than the current one you are using right now.

Most people don't seem to understand that, do the subscription, and as they never understood what they really signed up for, are happy.

It's not even unethical by Jetbrains, it's perfectly fine and OK. But it IS a clever trick.

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