AFIAK GDPR only applies if you're profitable, otherwise a fine on revenue ... pre-revenue isn't applicable.
Now - I never was tasked with actually using their software while I worked there, that was just the talking point in the town halls and all hands and such. Being able to export/import was part of that interoperability goal.
No matter what choice you make, it's always going to be vendor-locked in.
Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted,
means that you're rewriting a lot of code.
Locked-in means that switching it out for something else is either A) impossible, or B) would require an investment greater than just sticking with the existing thing.
When you write software in a loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive way, the intersection between different components is designed to not take much work to replace one component or another. The same is true of systems. If the interfaces of those components are simple, and their use is cohesive, it should not be difficult to replace a part. However, if your components are not cohesive, then it will be a huge pain in the ass to replace anything.
So, no, it's not a good idea to choose a platform because "everything is lock-in, so fuck it, i'll lock myself in even more!" As a developer, I can see the appeal, as it means less work for you. But as a business owner, this is a stupid reason to choose a solution. Choose solutions that will support the business and give it flexibility to change over time.
I agree with you. If you're starting out, if your business is not profitable, don't pick SaaS. Don't take the time and pay those 5 taxes. Rather just use the platform, and if you're scalable and profitable and growing, pick some other technology that supports you in the long run.
Let us buy our software, and separately, offer us a service agreement that actually has to provide value in its own right. The bundling of these in SaaS is what makes this obscene.
Raising the price of your product isn't rent seeking.
For example take Google Workspace - email, calendar, docs. Google has no particular patents for those, and I've never heard about startups in this area not getting traction because of IP troubles.
Same goes with Jira, or Github, or Slack, or AWS S3 - all of those don't have particularly many patents and in fact there are plenty of alternatives, self-hosted or otherwise. People still pay for them happily.
How is that rent seeking?
No, because that would require everyone to own and operate their own servers. I am very happy I do not have to share my bedroom with a server rack so that I can operate my company - not to speak of the cost to deploy a 15gbit/s line to my apartment…
By this logic, my house cleaner is rent-seeking because I pay every week, but I could do the work myself. That’s not what rent-seeking is. That is a garden variety service.
All of the anti-subscription sentiment just sounds like “I want perpetual support and updates for a one-time price”, which is just silly. It’s actually bad for the customer because once the service provider has your one-time payment, they have zero incentive to keep you as a customer.
It leads to misaligned incentives as sellers seek to expand to new markets to reach new customers while neglecting existing customers who are nothing but expense.
Further, SaaS produces net lower costs because resources can be utilized more efficiently. Great, you can do an on-premise server, but you need to spec it to support the busiest second in the busiest day of your year. Most of the time it will be underutilized.
Sorry, this whole claim is such a massive misunderstanding of Smith and SaaS that it’s making be a bit crazy.
The anti-subscription sentiment is not without merit, however. Software that just runs on your computer now has a fucking subscription for no reason. Adobe, games, etc. That is rent-seeking, because I want to pay for the goddamn thing once and own it. I don't care for support or upgrades; if I do, I'll buy the newer version.
If I think a service is worth $20 month, that will not change if their cost structure changes and suddenly it costs them $1 or $100 per month to offer. It’s worth $20 to me either way. If their cost becomes $1, I rely on competition to create the consumer surplus.
Every commercial company is free to charge whatever they want, it's not rent-seeking (unless there is a monopoly, but your argument is applies to small companies as well).
And yes, the fact that you cannot find the software you need for the pricing model you like sucks.. but it is not rent-seeking. And the fact that my local Home Depot does not have cheap, but reliable refrigerators is not rent-seeking either. At worst, it is collusion between manufacturers.
This is very specific contribution in economic productivity, as the company gets no work done when the communications system is down.
Start with a few services at ~10$/user/month and it doesn’t take a very large org before the numbers get quite high. And you generally still need some technical support in house.
If you're not a larger company you are paying consultants and the licensing fees.
Until hard drive died on that server and turns out backups were broken for the last 5 years.
Until someone tried to fix some (real or perceived) problem with the server and it suddenly became full of malware.
What’s the economic explanation then for why so much high quality (or at least, widespread and critical) free software exists?
Take the Linux kernel as an example. If you were a kernel hacker, even a minor one, from the 1990s, it's quite likely you could parlay that experience into a good job today doing something similar. Those 50-100 hours decades ago have compounded quite nicely for you. But your contribution didn't decay over the next 30 years - worst case scenario, it stayed exactly as good as it was when you stopped, and best case scenario it's been substantially rewritten and incremented upon.
That's how I explain it to myself at least.
I'm saying that if you don't want to use a platform because it's "lock-in," but then use SaaS... then the argument doesn't hold true, especially if you consider the "taxes" of using SaaS.
Which is... not really controversial. Fewer vendors makes your life easier. Fewer dependencies makes your life easier. It would be awesome if you could build your entire product based on the standard library alone! Sadly... that's not really realistic. Nice pipe-dream though.
The reason why I really love Cloudflare is because of their bindings. A lot of the time you are simply using fetch, so request and response to interact with their services. It feels as if fetch has become like the Unix pipe of the web.
Which means in 10 years they will really be locked in because no one is going to un-entrench that thing.
So I'm trying to encourage you to consider picking a platform and just sticking with the tools of the platform rather than bundling it yourself together.
Granted this approach requires a little foresight...something many companies seem to not have nowadays.
Getting your data into and out of Salesforce is easy, it has excellent APIs. Rewriting your applications is the bigger hurdle.
Often it's less effort to lean in and use all features of the service than to limit yourself to a least common denominator between all competing services.
Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM
Because of AI, the difficulty in writing code is greatly reduced. And because of platforms, the difficulty of shipping to production is greatly reduced.
That combination can be really great for your velocity when trying to build a business.
Agreed on both of your assesments Best of luck!
Because that's the incentive, particularly with products that are naturally fading and ceasing to make new sales.
> Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code.
The point of something open-source and self-hosted is that it resolves nearly all of the "taxes" mentioned in the article. What the article refers to as the discovery, sign-up, integration, and local development tax are all easily solved by a good open-source local development story.
The "production tax" (is tax the right word?) can be resolved by contributions or a good plugin/module ecosystem.
people is gonna find out why companies pays top dollar for close source alternative vs open source product
dasil003•8h ago
pistoriusp•8h ago
> No matter what choice you make, it's always going to be vendor-locked in. Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code.
The argument is that you might as well not "spend" those 5 taxes, just use the platform, and write the software.
yed•8h ago
pistoriusp•8h ago
yed•4h ago