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Comment by pastaj36 | Hacker News Reader

Tough spot with community that expects firmware updates while hardware sells only once

It's sort of a self imposed problem as well because the community produces a bunch of pull requests, but only the corporate staff members can approve and merge them into the official firmware. It begs the question why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.

  > why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.

Because it's still useful to have a blessed child so that people getting into the space have somewhere to start. You could accept zero additional PRs and it would still be a useful thing to have.

The hardware is static so the rate of software rot is pretty low. It can effectively not be maintained as long as it's already in a stable state. Adding new features is cool and all but it also adds more bugs.

But the great thing is that there's a community, all using the same hardware, and people can fork. So people can still get those updates that they want. Maybe the only thing to do is create a community fork that is much more open but doesn't come with the same stability promises. But that can still be a lot of work, even if you get community maintainers

Easy fix: Allow donations, merge updates once donation pool is enough to pay for the maintainers' time.

Donating to a russian company with all the sanctions in place?

What makes it a Russian company? The team is allegedly spread across the globe, the company (Flipper Devices Inc.) is registered in DE, USA and there's a London office.

They are registered all over the place yet somehow comply with neither UK nor EU warranty laws, and are unable to provide normal legal B2B documents in EU/UK (https://flipper.net/pages/b2b-and-tax-exemption-policy). Company is run by russians, for a long time they tried hard to hide the fact their servers were still in russia after they claimed to move out.

has that ever worked, ever?

I've heard people talk about this "solution" for over a decade, especially with crypto trying to justify itself, but I've never seen it successful.

yeah in the crypto space there is never consensus on what a developer costs, the donation pools and bounties are priced for a passionate developer in Malaysia as there are very few speculators from the few High Cost of Living places that the builders get opportunities from, in comparison to the rest of the of the world

developers all end up launching their own things and getting all the money up front in some way or another

more communities burned

I would love to contribute towards getting Bluetooth keyboards working on freebsd. They have the drivers and most of the core working, even BT mice work, but keyboards aren't there yet.

This

In my experience this doesn't work because people in large groups usually demand maintenance for free and donate explicitly for features they personally want.

You usually end up with insufficient donations to move anything, but now gained a bunch of users who think they own the devs and complain about every change which isn't that one thing they donated for...

Much easier fix: They already open-sourced everything, the official branch is sufficiently stable and feature-rich. People are free to fork and create something new, decoupled from the Flipper team and maybe even financed by donations if they want to.

Which is just another way of saying "this is why most developers prefer subscriptions over one-time sales"

Yeah, they do, but an actually fair to all sides model is that of one-time sales coupled with optional paid-for updates.

That's basically a variant of a subscription, but one where the end user churns aggressively.

It's worse in many ways too - it's a lot harder to gauge interest as the developer to understand how well any update will sell, and if the updates "stack", then a user only pays for the newest update to get all older features free. It's also worse from a cashflow perspective for the developer (but better for consumer) since they have to pre-build the update before any chance of getting paid for it.

I'd be surprised if the churn was as high as the subscription model.

If I buy a product and like it as-is then I don't necessarily want it to change over time.

Buy once is better, buy once with optional updates or periodic version releases is better still.

The principal difference is that things keep working if I stop paying. All other aspects are secondary.

And generally speaking there is a lot of options that are excellent for developers but complete shit for the users. That's obvious, but it's also off the point in the context of fairness.

What's funny, or maybe sad, is that this used to be a solved problem back in the CD-distribution era of software. You buy the software once (or in this case the hardware that comes with a software license). You get bugfix patches and minor updates for a year. Next year the next version releases with major new features, and you either pay the price of an update or you stay on the version you are on. Good incentives for all sides. Development stays aligned with existing users, because otherwise they just stop buying updates. And in return the developer gets predictable revenue.

Then Minecraft pioneered the model of users paying once and getting free lifetime updates. And shortly thereafter various SaaS pioneered the model of the user paying monthly while the software barely changes.

And somehow we pretend like those two business models aren't both broken, and like the first one somehow doesn't work anymore

Are you sure that minecraft pioneered that model?

It is certainly a very well-known instance of it, but pioneered?

Maybe popularized is the better word. It probably wasn't the first software ever to do this; free lifetime updates became viable with the internet sometime in the nineties and Minecraft only started doing it in 2009. But at the risk of being proven wrong I'm willing to claim Minecraft was the first software to do this and go mainstream, being recognizable outside its niche

I know Guild Wars had original idea in the era of "lets make new world of warcraft and get rich from subscriptions" to release mmorpg without any subscription, you only buy it once and you can play forever. It was 2005.

You have your timeline slightly wrong because GW1 (if we take dev time into account) basically launched at the same time as WoW - and WoW wasn't the first subscription MMO. I suppose if this was a major reason, EverQuest would be the one to inspire it.

Everquest was 1999. Ultima Online was 1997 and had a $10/month subscription price.

True, I had forgotten about UO, but for the sake of the argument I don't think it really matters. I don't have numbers ready, I had always seen EQ as the bigger mainstream success, could be wrong. Also was a bit before my time, I didn't pay sub fees for my games until 2004/05ish.

Edit: I didn't actually want to say that EQ invented it, but I had phrased that badly.

I don't remember minecraft being a driver of this - I do remember Patio11 on here being very influential in start ups doing subscription software instead of "finished" desktop applications.

That is not to blame him, but I remember his writing being very influential with start up founders.

I pay for LittleSnitch major releases. I’m kind of forced to, in order to keep up with macOS major releases.

Maybe they can sell the hardware which includes 1 major upgrade release.

Maybe they can have a Kickstarter campaign to fund new releases.

Total Commander is pay once, free updates forever. It's over 30 years old now.

RAR / WinRAR - same and it's even older.

Then just open source the firmware. We'll update it ourselves.

https://github.com/flipperdevices/flipperzero-firmware/blob/...

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