I've been thinking about something a lot today. I think it's a microcosm of a big problem with the way many average people move through the world.Why do so many software engineers hate paying for software?
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@polotek Well, I guess we need data/surveys to be able to look at what people do.
Otherwise it's probably narrowed observations or opinion, especially since you seem to reduce your claim to βdevelopers with disposable incomesβ, which themselves probably represent a minority of developers in the world.
Still it remains an interesting topic, and it would be interesting to know what are the kind of softwares that devs are okay or not okay to pay for. And same with companies.
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@meduz it is never a goal of mine to assume I have to account for every person in the entire world whenever I wanna talk about something. It's really okay to assume I have a certain context and maybe it doesn't include you. You can have whatever conversation you wanna have and you don't have to include me. I won't be upset. Cheers.
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@polotek skepticism for the most part, and knowing how to satisfy most needs with FOSS that i can then tune, support and modify. In my 25 yrs of experience, less than a handful of vendors have provided value worthy of the spend. BSDi, Sun, NeXT (webobjects), CockroachDB, AWS. The FOSS offerings are just that good. Redis, PostgreSQL, Qemu, SBCL, nginx. Itβs only when patents, real innovation, or exceptionally specific needs on the edge of hardware capabilities are needed that commercial vendors stand up.
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@craigbro yes you're pretty much stating my point. You are a gainfully employeed software developer who legitimately feels like the hard work you produce is not worth actual dollars. Can you help me understand why that is?
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@polotek my struggle is that some software categories are filled with companies as target market instead of consumer, which leads to prices being targeted at company buying power
a recent example: i want some traffic analytics for my site, but it doesnβt get enough traffic for me to feel $9/mo is justified. personally, iβd pay maybe $40/year tops?
that led me to βwhat if i just build it myself?β β i suppose i will soon find out if $9/mo is justified or not
i do pay for some mobile apps tho
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@wilson yeah this is real. Most good software has to be supported by b2b dollars. Which means it's not as well designed for small scale use cases. But there are usually some cheaper options out there. They are just harder to find because they can't spend on advertising and being at the top of Google searches.
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@wilson so maybe it's worthwhile to think of the cost as "the value of the software + the cost of avoiding a deeper search for alternatives".
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@polotek Well, perhaps you are confusing some categories here?
I don't get paid for software itself, I get paid, and really well at that, for solving problems and building information systems, of which software is one component, along with hardware, people, and data. In the past, I have sold software, and also services built on software. In addition to the few times I've paid for software I listed above, I have paid for support contracts from vendors like ES. I have also donated to many different free software projects with both time and money.
So, I am just not grokking your assertion. Are you trying to understand why I would give away work as FOSS? Or why I don't use commercial software?
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@craigbro "In my 25 yrs of experience, less than a handful of vendors have provided value worthy of the spend."
Were all the devs building those tools doing useless work? Did they deserve to be paid despite the fact it was useless? If so, how do you think they should be compensated given that the thing they are building isn't actually worth any money in your opinion?