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Comment by tschellenbach | Hacker News Reader

While it's true that this can happen to external tools, it doesn't happen very often. Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well. For in-house developed software it happens frequently that past employees leave the codebase in a state, where new team members end up rewriting it.

So it's a bit weird to say you shouldn't use closed source since there is a small chance things change in a way we don't like, and then your alternative is to use in-house software, where maintenance issues in the future are pretty much guaranteed.

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>Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well.

I would say that's not quite accurate. They have only one incentive: profit.

Long term supported products are one way of getting money, but it's most definitely not the only way. Many times it's not the most profitable one either.

Companies don't make shitty decisions because they are scheming on how to screw customers up. They do it because when push comes to shove, only profit matters.

One guy will plot a chart saying if we screw customers this way (with pretty words, of course) we can get X% more profit. Then they get promoted and this cycle repeats itself. Or a pandemic hits and suddenly your margins decrease drastically. Now screwing the customer is back on the table.

Unless your company only plans to be running for a few years, those are not as rare as we may think.

My alternative is to use battle tested open source software. I don't suggest writing a database in house.

Also, I would say the opposite, it happens all the time. There's only a few closed source software tools that have been around for more than fifteen years, and countless that didn't make it.

> Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well.

This is only sometimes true. If a company knows their product's growth phase is over, they may decide to milk the existing customers as much as possible. That's the right choice for maximizing profit.

I believe that's what happened with a previous company I worked at. Vendor of an old software product started suing about licensing violations trying to extract more. They couldn't harm future sales, because no one was going to buy the thing anymore. A team spent a year replacing it.

If AWS actually tried to abuse its power, it would really damage the tech industry. Tech companies would see the risk and start treating the cloud as rented machines (EC2), and stop realizing all the benefits of their provider managing a complex system on their behalf.

If I were AWS, I'd willingly write into contracts that costs can go up no faster than the PPI + 5%, barring some sort of force majeure. Hardware gets cheaper, so I'd expect costs to come down, but this essentially "we're not going to screw you" clause.

If AWS tried to abuse its power, people would switch to another CSP.

While certainly, the shift would not be easy, but if AWS increased their prices enough, it could still be a savings in the long run.

EDIT: On the other hand, publicly traded companies are often extremely short-sighted because they have to make those quarterly reports, so maybe they would be unwilling to spend $X over the course of a year in order to save $X every year after that.

Such a platform should be a co-op owned by all the users, designed for the public good. It really is almost like a piece of infrastructure.

But AWS is a business, and businesses are there to make money. They are there to extract as much money as possible from users. I doubt they'll ever do a big change like Unity, but I bet they end up with a slow boil of raising prices.

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