[HN Gopher] Who Does That Server Serve? (2010)
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Who Does That Server Serve? (2010)
Author : redbell
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-02-06 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gnu.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gnu.org)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Replacing a product you sell, which results in a periodic,
| unpredictable, and spiky revenue stream, with a subscription or
| lease is an explicit goal of American business theology.
|
| You as a software developer will never convince the guys that
| hired you to NOT do that, because it's literally and clearly Good
| For Business.
|
| Good Software development, good Product development, etc, is
| _Art_ , ie knowing which tradeoffs will benefit a subset of
| users, knowing where to spend limited time optimizing for the
| best results, caring about aesthetics and accessibility and
| interoperability, caring about software freedoms...
|
| Business Management abhors art because even if you as a CEO or
| something value it on some level, it's impossible to generate the
| kind of graphs that please the beancounters from artistic merits.
| seanhunter wrote:
| You won't convince them because you don't understand why they
| think the things they do. Even if you hate management and
| business types altogether, you're never going to be able to
| understand them unless you actually consider they may have a
| rational basis for their actions. In this case, they don't care
| about subscriptions because they hate art or hate freedom or
| have a "theology" or anything like that.
|
| Subscriptions are preferable to one-off payment for a software
| product primarily because software incurs an ongoing cost
| (support, maintenance, enhancement etc which users have come to
| expect and also servers etc for any online features the
| software needs) and therefore it's better to match that with an
| ongoing revenue stream. If you have an ongoing cost base but
| only point-in-time revenue then every sale you make is
| essentially creating future problems because you are creating
| future cost that isn't supported by revenue. You essentially
| have turned your business economics into a Ponzi scheme and can
| only keep going if you perpetually grow sales which is not
| sustainable.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| Rich Siegel would like a word.
|
| There absolutely is a theology of business, and currently it
| is this: make as much money as possible.
|
| Commercial software existed long before the subscription
| model consumed everything, and it was, and still is,
| sustainable. Subscriptions didn't consume the software
| ecosystem because the alternative is not sustainable;
| subscriptions took over because they make _more_ money (and
| often for less effort).
|
| It's fine if you want to describe that as rational decision-
| making in business contexts, but I have to object if you
| cross a line into arguing that there are no viable
| alternatives. There are subscriptions, and then there are
| _less profitable_ alternatives.
| Borg3 wrote:
| Exacly. Additionaly, you can sell software and include a
| year support bundle. If you want to have longer support (or
| extend support), you have to play extra (pear year). That
| sounds reasonable.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > also servers etc for any online features the software needs
|
| This is usually a deliberate choice made by software
| companies. They take their software that _could_ be (or used
| to be) run on the user 's local PC and then unnecessarily
| move it to a server. Then, they conveniently have a "Well I
| have to run a server" excuse for changing to a subscription
| model. You wouldn't have the costs of running a server if you
| didn't decide to shoehorn that server into the software in
| the first place!
| sophacles wrote:
| Even if you only sell shrinkwrap software there are ongoing
| costs for your business in the form of sales,
| accounting/payroll, office rent, customer support and so
| on.
|
| If you want to have bugfixes available for customers you
| have to pay developers to do that, and infrastructure for
| releasing them - this is an ongoing cost.
|
| The problem is orthogonal to where software runs: there are
| subscription models for fully downloadable software that
| doesn't have to interact with a server (jetbrains for
| example, and some games).
| johnea wrote:
| All of the logic in this entire sub-thread is based on
| the idea that thet s/w has to be ssold by a vendor.
|
| Large orginazations, representing classes of users
| (architects, engineers, people who type documents and
| calculate numbers) could produce s/w for their own use,
| not to sell, and make this s/w available under a free
| software GPL license.
|
| They would save the money they would have spent buying
| this s/w, and spread those savings to everyone else who
| used the s/w.
|
| I don't want to retype or paste the entry I made below,
| but please read it and respond to this alternative.
|
| Thanks for the discussion!
| wat10000 wrote:
| The standard way to do this was to sell a license for a
| specific major version. It goes through a lifecycle where
| it's initially the most current, then gets superseded by a
| new major version and maybe gets a few more bug fixes, and at
| some point one of those releases is the last one for that
| major version and it's done. Buyers can continue using it
| forever, but there's no maintenance/enhancement cost, and
| support can be stopped too if you want.
|
| This worked for decades and continues to work today for some
| companies. It's not a Ponzi scheme in any sense.
| johnea wrote:
| Your statements all seem correct, but its important to point
| out (and I think this is what you're trying to do) that the
| logic is based on meeting the needs of vendors/businesses, not
| the needs of users.
|
| What percentage of people own businesses? What percentage of
| people use things? ergo What benefits more people: reducing
| spending for products, or increasing business profits?
|
| Some things are best resolved by a profit seeking model, but
| far far from all things.
|
| How many billions of dollars in expenditures would be saved, if
| institutional users (schools, universities, large businesses,
| trade/professional organizations) developed s/w for their own
| use, and shared it via a GPL license?
|
| Instead, (statistically) all of these orgs accept the
| "philanthropic" "gifts" of for-profit s/w products, and
| subsequently lock all members of each demographic into a
| lifetime of purchasing that s/w.
|
| It's like giving out "free" heroin in high schools. The
| lifetime profits are enormous.
|
| Think AutoCAD, but also everyone paying for simple things like
| Word/Excel/etc. Often, these desktop applications have already
| been paid for by the h/w maker, making it even more obfuscated
| from the user.
|
| Widely deployed software freedom would save users billions of
| dollars, but instead of presenting this as a giant saving, it's
| presented as a terrible detriment to "business".
|
| This is the propaganda that has brain damaged the US
| population. The idea that benefiting corporations is benefiting
| them.
| hedora wrote:
| It's good to see the GNU project _finally_ recommend AGPL
| (prohibits use in proprietary services) over GPLv3 (prohibits
| shipping software on practically all modern consumer devices).
|
| Maybe they could update AGPL and call it GPLv4, so the "or later"
| clause would kick in and fix things for real.
| Volundr wrote:
| Doesn't the "or later" clause give the user the _option_ of
| using the software under the newer license? I 'm pretty sure
| they can keep applying the GPLv3.
| Snild wrote:
| Yes, until the original project starts releasing new changes
| under the new license. From there, the "selfish" party would
| have to fork and maintain what they have on their own.
| Volundr wrote:
| That doesn't require GPLv4 though. Anyone wanting to switch
| their project to the AGPL can just start releasing new
| versions under it. Existing code would be available as
| GPLv3 and the newer stuff under AGPL, same as the v4
| scenario.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Yeah, when I was planning to switch my personal Apache-licensed
| stuff to GPL, I decided to switch to AGPL instead. Most of my
| stuff makes no sense for it to be used as part of a web service
| etc, but it doesn't hurt to make it future-proof.
| johnea wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by this.
|
| GPL s/w runs on all desktop OSs, and at least on Android (see
| many examples on F-DROID).
|
| Maybe you're refering to iOS? I'm not sure about the collsion
| between GPL and Apple's terms.
| scblock wrote:
| It's completely possible to take a piece of GPLv2 or v3
| software, make extensive changes, and provide it only as a
| web service without ever being required to make those changes
| available to the community. AGPL solves for that important
| case, where if you use AGPL software to provide a service and
| make changes, in addition to providing the service you must
| also make your changes available to the community.
|
| But I think I misunderstood your point, you were focused on
| the GPLv3 itself. Which I don't think prohibits running on
| any computer as you say.
| johnea wrote:
| You're correct that I was refering to GPL s/w being able to
| run on "consumer devices".
|
| But to your first point:
|
| I'm not a lawyer (thankfully), but my interpretation of
| GPL: that the s/w source must be published if the s/w is
| "distributed", would require the source of SaaSS s/w to be
| published, since the "service" is distributing that s/w.
|
| Is that not correct?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > the "service" is distributing that s/w
|
| If it's running on their machine, they're not
| distributing it; users don't actually receive the
| software to run themselves and are instead making
| requests to a server that is running the software.
| (Client software would be different, of course.) I am
| also not a lawyer so perhaps take with a grain of salt.
| Xophmeister wrote:
| While I definitely sup from the RMS Kool-Aid, I can't help but
| notice that it sounds a lot like small-government libertarianism
| (s/government/corporations). You're the product, and all that,
| but maybe that angle dilutes the point he's making. Why should
| software be any different to basically everything else; unless
| you're one of those crackpots who bury gold bullion because you
| don't trust the man?
| thadt wrote:
| Freedom is being able to decide where I get my things done. I can
| choose to bake bread at home in my own personal oven, and
| sometimes I do. Or I can choose to buy bread from a bakery. The
| act of buying bakery made bread is not, in itself, an unethical
| decision. It's a task that I'm outsourcing to someone else -
| which is how an economy works. Ethics come in when discussing how
| the bakery makes their bread vs my expectations. If they're
| cutting sawdust into their flour, then we might have an issue.
|
| I have the exact example problem mentioned: translation services.
| In my specific case, I'm helping research a lot of old,
| handwritten documents in my non-native language. Turns out LLMs
| are surprisingly good at _language_ and are rather useful for
| this. I 've toyed with running them on my laptop, but the current
| state of the art is just a bit better and runs faster on someone
| else's server. In deciding whether to do this job locally or on a
| SASS, I'm weighing a number of factors. But whether using a SASS,
| at all, is 'doing me wrong' is not one of them.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I think the principle that would apply is only choosing SaaS
| solutions which you could, if wanted, run locally (even if it's
| not a practical consideration at the current moment due to
| time, power, or space constraints).
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