Write "Freehold" Software | Hacker News Reader

Write "Freehold" Software

deadbeef.io

75 pointsrjinman32 comments

I would prefer a name that strongly implies ownership.

Such that by definition it becomes painfully obvious that you don't really own the other stuff when confronted with it.

In the UK freehold versus leasehold do evoke these terms, but only if you've entered the housing market to learn about it by getting bitten first. So not really an instantly recognisable term otherwise.

Then again, perhaps the focus here should be to also start calling all that other software "leasehold" software. I think that would then send the right message and establish "freehold software" as a useful term.

The term leasehold fits well come to think of it. You still "buy" your flat, but there's a lease stipulating conditions and an expiry date (typically decades at least), meaning there are many restrictions to full enjoyment of your purchased property, which also affect your ability / profitability to sell, and at some point you (or your children) might even stop having what you thought were ownership rights.

I completely agree with the "freehold" principle, and it's how I exclusively release any of my work however how we get back there for the majority I just don't know. The only apps I know that are a success in the modern day that are using that model is Goodnotes that saves repurchase for significant updates which I think is acceptable, and Affinity design apps. I sense many feel their business model is better suited to subscriptions and the lapsed subscription fee is also valuable. It's likely a societal change whereby many are not happy to spend significant upfront costs on software now. Even a small amount on an app can be thought of as too much.

> significant upfront costs on software now. Even a small amount on an app can be thought of as too much

My experience with google play store is that useful apps have in app purchases, but you don't know ahead of time if the feature you need is free or addon. An app store that requires disclosure and filtering by paid features would help there, as users may be ok with paying ahead of time if the can actually find them.

> I sense many feel their business model is better suited to subscriptions

Self-plug, but sometimes the developer just straight up needs income for a basic living. My terminal emulator [0] is in Early Access, meaning fans throw me $5/mo. Each month they get a new version and the binary is 100% offline (theirs to own.)

I sincerely want to respect the customer's wallet/privacy, yet I don't know what else to do while staying indie: my direct competitors either have VC funding [1] or the author's a wealthy retired CEO [2].

However, once I reach a 1.0 stable release I'll switch to a one-off payment system. I'm also not against a Business Source License when the time comes.

[0] https://terminal.click

[1] https://warp.dev

[2] https://ghostty.org

It is sort of funny that the one type of software that manages to get any momentum behind it for this sort of thing—games—is really pointless (I enjoy games too, I just don’t think preserving most of them is a big deal).

For work software, it definitely should be able to run locally and without any license server or whatever. I’m baffled by people who don’t feel the need to own their tools. Open Source software mostly seems to fill this gap for me, but like most of the folks here, I only really need programming tools, which are over-represented in the open source ecosystem for obvious reasons.

Proprietary “freehold” software, I dunno. It could be interesting. I guess I kinda feel like: if your software isn’t going to do DRM, talk to license servers, or whatever, I guess your business model must include the fact that people will probably make unauthorized copies of your software. So, maybe just open source it? Then you have the classic “building a business on my open source library” problem, which is very hard, but at least you have lots of company.

The big difference between open source and proprietary but freehold seems to be precisely that those copies are unauthorized. That already eliminates most of your competition as nobody else can sell your software and distributions can't just distribute it. Sure, people will pirate, but even DRM doesn't seem to prevent that.

> I enjoy games too, I just don’t think preserving most of them is a big deal

Games are undoubtedly one of the most significant forms of cultural artifacts of our time. (For example, contemporary games arguably inform youth culture significantly more than contemporary literature does.)

If your emphasis is on "most", then this is a pretty silly argument: By this logic, we also ought not preserve any movies in our national libraries because most movies are cheap entertainment or outright slop. Same for any other form of media really. Sturgeon's Law and all.

I enjoy this idea, but it's undercut somewhat by the author asking ChatGPT to define the term they're writing a post about define.

I'm not sure what the anecdote is meant to add, either. ChatGPT and other hosted LLMs seem to be the antithesis of "freehold software."

Am I missing something?

I wasn't asking it to define it. I came up with the list of principles first, then spent ages trying to think of a suitable name for them. It was quite gratifying when ChatGPT, without any context, when asked to guess what the term "freehold" might mean with respect to software, came up with almost the exact same set of principles. That told me that the "freehold" term is a pretty good fit. It would be an incredible coincidence otherwise.

Oh, I see, almost rubber-ducking the semantic meaning of the term. That makes more sense to me. Apologies for my knee-jerk LLM skepticism.

I approach this dichotomy with two tiers of software: "core functionality" and "nice to have". For items that have become core, I have a fallback I can use that is something I have a high degree of control over. This is typically something like freehold software, although I'm more extreme and very strongly prefer libre software.

But in cases where the functionality is quite compelling (like multi-hundred billion parameter models) and also hard to run on hardware I control, I tend to relent, and work with the "nice to haves" so I can learn about them and leverage them, but I routinely practice with my fallback software.

One example: I use Google Maps for search because it's so darn good at it, but I regularly use OsmAnd~ or Organic Maps with offline maps and on-device routing for actual navigation (despite the lack of traffic insights!) so I'm proficient with them in case I need to ditch Google Maps entirely (due to policy change, technical issue, or something else).

There is a cost-revenue pairing issue with traditional software business models: if someone pays upfront, how do you pay to deliver bug fixes? In games that offer any kind of multi it's worse because you have continued server costs as well.

One could say, for example, "ship bug free" or perhaps more reasonably, "include the net present value of future costs". Both of those are essentially infeasible.

Subscription model software one-shots the cost-revenue pairing issue.

Support contract if you want updates, or limited free support for critical bugs. If you want the next major with more feature you pay again.

Welcome back to the 90s; I miss that model of software, as do a lot of people. When you buy something, you still have that something. It may become obsolete in time but as long as you have the hardware/OS that can run it, you still have access to it.

I worked in a daycare center when I was in my teens. I saw a kid (doing a kid thing) with a bag of skittles. He was giving it out to his friends but licking each skittle as he handed them out. I did put a stop to it but I had to stop chuckling to myself at the faces everyone made when getting a pre-licked skittle first. Fast forward a few decades and software subscriptions remind me of that moment, every single time.

Sketch, CleanShot, and Jetbrains come to mind as software that uses this model. It seems the most fair to me: pay once, get forever usage of the software, and one year of free updates. After that, additional years of updates are often a discounted rate.

An issue I ran into when I tried this with my software is that it’s not a very common model so people didn’t really get it. They’d call it a subscription, or they’d call it lifetime, and some got very angry when I mentioned anything about renewing for updates.

It’s a hard thing to describe succinctly, and it’s even harder to ensure that description survives the game of telephone as they tell their friends/followers.

An easy way to solve this, at least long term and collectively, is to have a new term that refers to this model. I'd call it "the JetBrains model".

In my case there's not really one product I can expect everyone to know about, but I think this works well when there's an existing big product in the category to point to as an example.

> An issue I ran into when I tried this with my software is that it’s not a very common model so people didn’t really get it.

Instead of a years updates, which is a bit amorphous in terms of actual value delivered over the time frame, an alternate is you buy a major version, get all updates to that for free, for as long as it is updated in any way, including bug fixes.

Then pay for the next major version, only if you want to (with a discount for owners of the previous one).

And put the major version number into the name of the software, i.e. "Digibrain 1", "Digibrain 2", ...

Then continue to sell version X-1 at a discount, after X is released, to get more sales from the lower end of the market. And so owners of X-1 can still feel the love and less "out of date". Or even all previous versions at log drops in price. And bug fix old versions indefinitely, which is very purchaser friendly.

Another choice would be selling new updates for a noticeably higher price initially, signaling it as "premium", not "we want more of your money", then bringing the price down before the next update.

Might not connect with everyone, but it makes the value and optionality of purchasing an update more apparent.

Obviously, updates better be worth it.

This provides an incentive to make every version major.

if you want to sell it, it should be. if it isn't worth a major version increment then it is probably also not worth charging for it as an upgrade.

You want to sell every upgrade, even the minor upgrades. Therefore the minor upgrades are actually major upgrades.

Never trust any contract of the form "X is free unless we say it's not"

yes but that is already true today, and it's wrong. you should not sell bug fixes and security patches. anything you sell needs to have value. minor upgrades do not have enough value. i am certainly would not pay for a minor upgrade. i'd just wait until enough new features have accumulated until the upgrade is worth it.

so charging for minor upgrades means that you end up with having to support users who didn't upgrade. that makes your support more expensive.

realistically i believe you don't want more than 2, maybe 3 versions of your product in active use, to keep your support load under control.

you could force people to buy minor upgrades by refusing to support the old version, but that would come across as exhortative.

Actually I pay for JetBrains product and report bugs to support. When subscription ends I have right to use version with bugs. It looks unfair to me.

As it stands right now the freehold category is unnecessarily restrictive, eliminating some great, fair price, games.

Polytopia for example would not be considered "freehold" because it contains one of micro transactions... However those are in a way ~ expansions like when you bought StarCraft II expansions.

The freehold apps website I'd never contribute to as one should always separate a vendor from a marketplace... Otherwise you just end up with Amazon basics....

Polytopia sells both skins and extra content as dlc so it's rightfully not included. Just as I expect SC2 is not included for the same reason. However I would agree, I feel freehold should go along with drm free

This is one of the reasons I chose Perl as the "foundation language" for my project, Pollyanna Framework. It's an off-Internet capable Web-based discussion system that can run using regular Web hosting, but can also be run locally on a local hotspot (e.g. together with Internet in a Box.)

Thank you for posting this essay.

The term the author is looking for is Freeware or Shareware.

In today's world the equivalent is FOSS. You don't really have ownership of software if you can't modify it, or pay someone else to. Not having source code is itself a sort of DRM.

No, the author explicitly mentions that paid software would also meet those definitions, provided you only need to pay once.

That’s partially why I’m interested in self hosting

I do think tastefully done telemetry with clear and easily accessible opt out is fine though. Nothing wrong with developers wanting to understand how their software is used in practice imo

I grew up in Freehold, NJ. Would this make any Freehold software I write Freehold2x?

So it’s “free” as in “hold my beer”?

No it's "free", after you pay for it.

Which in any other industry would be a paradoxical, tautological contradiction.

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