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Comment by jim-jim-jim | Hacker News Reader

If I paint a picture on a physical canvas, I can charge people to come into my house and take a look. If I bring the canvas to a park, I'm not entitled to say "s-stop looking at my painting guys!"

If you're worried about your work being infinitely reproduced, you probably shouldn't work in an infinitely-reproducible medium. Digitized content is inherently worthless, and I mean that in a non-derisive way. The sooner we realize this, the richer culture will be.

Really all content is worthless. Historically, we've always paid for the transmission medium (tape, CD) and confused it for the cost of art itself.

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and how do you reconcile any work in software development? If someone isn’t willing to work for free, should they just not work in the field at all? Do you think software culture would really be richer?

My income is tied to the labor time I exert in creating/supporting services. I don't sit back and collect royalties on the code itself. Software is one of the first fields where the fundamental worthlessness of content revealed itself, hence FOSS.

When you watch a musical performance, you are also paying for labor. Even when you buy a physical art object, all the costs involved decompose back to labor. When you have a digital copy of something, there is no labor input to its creation, so guess what the inherent value is.

Animators drew actual cels. Theater workers clocked in and screened the films. The guys at the DVD factory pressed the discs. We paid for all of this already. It's double-billing to charge for copypasting the mere likeness of something. Nobody's doing any work for that.

you’re allowed to tie your income to creating systems precisely because you’re not allowed to copy them from previous companies or other sources

selling software isn’t much different from a musician collecting royalties, especially now when everything’s shifted to a subscription model. it lets us keep pretending we’re adding value, even though most of them often stays the same for years

Sorry, but I don't buy it. It's not like we're milking a secret golden algorithm. If all my company's code were open sourced tomorrow, I don't think a competitor could do much with it, since they'd just be presented with bog standard CRUD. It's still relationships and sweat that's keeping the lights on for the time being.

You keep it in your house and charge people to come look at it (SaaS).

Those people sometimes look at it and build a copy (competitor) and that's okay.

You don't have to publish your code, or allow other people to run it.

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