Software will never, ever be more than mechanism.
Peak software is when it fades into the background, and focus stays on the task at hand.
Of course we can't pretend that each business, or government institution is going to be able to have a handful of full stacks around just to keep up with the business requirements, but in reality, if that was the case, thing would operate much more smoothly.
Software for the masses is another category completely separate from anything that is going to help you achieve more at work, social media is an example and I think AI to a large extent is the same, since a generic gpt, one without knowledge of the past and present of your organisation, deeply ingrained in your culture will also fail to provide that particular set of knowledge that you can call invaluable for your use case.
And Google Workspace is a vastly superior solution to its predecessor offline or semi-online office suites, allows live collaboration and works across devices. Hubspot has a real, usable mobile app. Even Power BI is a step up from whatever pile of excels used to pass as reporting.
Overall it works pretty well but I don’t know. It feels kind of clunky, especially with all the information it presents. Admittedly I don’t know how they can get all that information cleanly on a small screen, so I’m not really blaming them. It’s just been my experience
Most importantly, there was no way to support my currently bog standard workflow of making docs and notes on a computer, sharing it with colleagues in a chat with a simple link, where 2-3 people can edit it at the same time, and then checking out their changes or referring back to the notes on a phone.
Not to mention stuff like presenting a deck directly into an online meeting where participants can browse ahead or look through the slides back.
All of that is easily worth $10/seat/mo in productivity and would be very difficult to configure not as a service.
The idea some shared document editing is worth $10/seat/month is absolutely insane. We have built a temple to madness.
What if that host goes down when the user needs it most, who is responsible for that? Who is doing backup or recovery? What if there is a security breach and users lost data? because Internet access is a must if the server is shared among "dozens of users".
If $10/month is insane, how much should it cost and why?
Why would it be? I understand your point about convenience, but not the difficulty of it.
The problem with SaaS today is that the subscription-based model is getting out of hand - the value proposition no longer makes sense, in many cases.
And secondly, vendor lock-in. You cannot get your data out. Or if you can, you will be less likely able to migrate to another provider or local application which means there is no free market where various providers can compete with better features, customer support, availability or price. Therefore, in the end the provider will hold you hostage via your own data. This is, after all, Amazon AWS's famous moat. It is often very expensive and painful to migrate into some in-house solution. And often it is simply not possible at all as it might require such a massive rewrites of your own application(understand as dependency on the provider), that it is not in the realm of possibility.
So with like everything else, you are responsible for your own choices and if you make a bad judgement, like tying yourself to one provider, that is all on you.
People keep yapping about monopolies in tech, yet they vehemently dislike decentralisation or taking care of their own stuff and want to have all the things on one place. But when things do not work out as they wanted, then these monopolies become a problem that is too late to mitigate.
tl;dr do not use SaaS of mission-critical functionality and you'll be fine.
Yes, we never needed the cloud. We could’ve kept the servers onsite or in data centers like we used to and pay much less to do much more. I worked in a startup that had hundreds of servers, and that was enough, and that served phones from cellular customers and mobile devices from some major cellular companies and media companies. Not many IT staff were needed for that and as devs we never had to think of how it was hosted, even though I did from my former experience.
Now, when I develop, I have to have at least a basic understanding of AWS since our production code is built and hosted there.
We have so many risks now. We can’t even use a package manager without worrying about secrets being stolen. We give away our secrets and code to an LLM that knows our intellectual property before we do, because it’s creating it.
Development has been an increasing dystopia from the beginning.
I don’t know if you’ve seen Silo, but if you have look at the monochrome graphical fileserver-ish UX that they use in the first season. I love that. I wish our shit were like that.
But no. Instead we keep developing features no one asked for requiring new expensive equipment. Our aging parents can’t even operate a TV because instead of an on/off switch with volume and channel buttons, it’s either a complex UI or a cable box/TV combo with input selection- what is HDMI 1? They don’t know.
That’s a very obvious, legitimate security issue, why are you accusing people of being insincere about it?
Again, that's inconvenient but doable, just like phishing prevention.
>That’s a very obvious, legitimate security issue, why are you accusing people of being insincere about it?
I'm not denying it's a security issue, any more than I'm denying that phishing isn't a security issue. I even specifically mentioned the possibility of employees that fail phishing training. I'm objecting specifically to the "ransom" framing, which is a pejorative way to imply that companies have a duty to offer all security features for free.
You might grumble about $30/mo for something like Postman, and it's true that "back in the day" it might have been a $40 one-off, but that's closer to $90 with inflation now, and there's a good chance that would have only bought you version 4.
Then next year version 5 comes out, and you face a dilemma. Do you pay all over again? Do you end up staying on version 4 until eventually there's a compelling reason to upgrade?
SaaS solves that problem by keeping everyone on the latest version.
Software is economically expensive to produce, we don't do enough to recognise that, in part because of how much free work is contributed by open source contributors and how little we recognise how much work they really do.
As for FOSS going unpaid. SaaS doesn't necessarily lead to FOSS contributors getting paid more than they would if their software was going into shrink wrapped products.
So... nothing from this century? I'm not even sure how software without activation/licensing would work out economically. You'd either need something like a CD/dongle check (which is a hassle/expensive), or accept that one copy is going to be endlessly passed around.
Most people don't really pass the license around. And it's not that much if you're a professional. But most subscriptions prices are egregious.
SaaS is fine for what it is. It's just not a trade off that suits everyone. And crucially it denies users control over the tools they're paying for.
I was grocery shopping the other day and saw Liquid Death, which is a brand of...water, but with edgy marketing? I'm told to "make things people need," and then regularly see rent-seeking companies held in great esteem, ultra-undifferentiated offerings such as Liquid Death, an API client with a monthly fee, and other things that seem to contradict the maxim of making things that people need.
If they see you drinking water or soda off a normal can, people will feel self conscious and get pissy about them drinking but not you, with a flaming skull on the can, nobody bats an eye.
The target audience is actually recovering alcoholics from party crowds, and the product is pure signaling.
> Software is economically expensive to produce
Maybe we just produce too much of it in an effort to justify our salaries and stock prices?
For all the software that's been produced over the last 2 decades, I'm not aware of any significant breakthroughs to show for all that effort (LLMs might be the closest, but they are down to sheer processing power rather than software itself).
My computer in 2010 was achieving basically the same tasks it achieves now - I can browser the web, buy goods online, watch videos, chat with people, play video games, and so on. My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.
But there's many "security flaws" that are nowhere near critical or just don't apply to your use-case for the software.
Not to mention local-first software has much less attack surface for pwnage. You can wrap insecure protocols with encrypted tunnels, you can share files from a legacy app with any secure file transfer app of your choice... or if all you need is local functionality you don't need to share at all which means no remote access possible.
Of course it sucks to occasionally lose your job, but in a system that's more efficient at allocating resources, this shouldn't be as big of a problem as it is today. I would expect purchasing power to be greater across the board and we would have a more prosperous standard of living as a baseline, primarily because labor isn't locked up and wasted in organizations that don't actually produce anything of value.
The problem is that everything after `-` is a service. Someone needs to keep those running.
By way of analogy: You don’t pay Walmart a one-time $30 fee and expect fully stocked shelves forever. You pay a small portion of every purchase to keep the supermarket service running.
Those services are either paid or havd (much less obnoxious) ads - that didn't change. OSes themselves were paid, typically baked into the purchase price of the computer.
> You don’t pay Walmart a one-time $30 fee and expect fully stocked shelves forever
But I don't expect Walmart to get worse at its primary purpose of taking my money. Imagine if Walmart replaced its perfectly-working checkout lanes with a new version where the PoS had a random ~10s delay in between scanning items, would have a 10% chance of reloading the page and force the cashier to rescan everything, would sometimes register the wrong items, and would distract the cashier with bullshit "suggestions" while he was trying to scan items. That would be crazy right?
Seems like rose colored nostalgia glasses.
- Operating systems have become MUCH more stable. I restart my computer every 3 months, it used to be every 2 days.
- I remember when I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it, and then repeating. I remember constant Skype issues around 2010. Facetime is practically flawless. Encoding has quietly gotten a lot better.
- Adaptability is amazing. I remember when software was only available on extremely specific devices, and now I can access almost everything I have from literally every device.
- Encryption by default is practically universal now.
- Seamless syncing. From version recovery to web browsing. We multitask a lot more.
- Universal file formats and APIs
While restarting some versions of Windows servers in the 2000s and 2010s to workaround memory leaks was normal, old OSes through history have been stable.
Linux has been around for decades and has been very stable.
Windows 3.1, 3.11 for workgroups, NT 4.0, Server 2000, XP, Vista, 10 & 11 have all been fairly stable after patches.
Win 95 and 98 after patches were stable enough. Win ME and 8 were crap, but Win 8 was more just crap experience.
Really most of the problems with Microsoft, Apple, Linux desktop environments and package systems could be categorized into being related to increases in complexity, many unnecessary changes, and just poor design or experience.
IBM chose macOS years ago because of the reduced cost to maintain them, while most IT professionals continue to choose Microsoft because the barrier to entry cost is low and because of familiarity, likely because younger people have Windows because it’s cheaper, they can play more games on it, and that’s what they grew up with, but Linux continues to be the primary server OS.
Little of that has to do with stability, and just because Windows 10 & 11 are stable doesn’t mean that things weren’t more stable 40-50 years ago. Linux admins for years prided themselves on the uptime metrics back then.
Note that Linux admins would’ve been in last ~40 years, but yes things were stable even longer ago. The problems came mostly with memory/resources not being cleaned up in C/C++ libraries and programs, primarily in Windows, because it was a little more chaotic with a lot of dev, a lot of differing hardware, and not as much oversight.
2010 is Windows 7 era, not the dark ages of pre-XP-SP2. I don't recall having computer crashes out of the blue - all the ones I've experienced are due to my own fault by trying to overclock the system.
I'm sure shitty hardware and drivers is a thing (this is traditionally where Apple excelled at in comparison) but I don't recall it being an issue on quality hardware.
> I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it
Shitty Wi-Fi/broadband/peering? Ironically nowadays I sometimes experience that too, except instead of waiting for video to download I'm waiting for some Javascript to finish re-rendering the page 3 times.
> I remember constant Skype issues around 2010
Again shitty connection maybe? I was spending every evening on Skype calls and to this day it's been way more reliable than anything I've tried since, thanks to it being P2P. So I guess if you were having constant issues it's down to the network.
Huh I remember times when I was basically reinstalling the system once a month because of file system issues.
Putting computer to hibernation nowadays works and earlier it would most definitely cause problems.
Funny how habits stick, I still shut my primary desktop down at the end of every day because for all of my youth that was just what you did.
They boot so damn fast it doesn't really matter and I kinda like starting the day with a "fresh" desktop (same reason I clean my desk every night - starting work with a neat desk is great - I trash it through the day and repeat).
I’m still fairly ruthless about not having a tonne of tabs open (also gonna be an age thing, I predate tabbed web browsers and for a while after their introduction you’d either grind them to a halt or crash them entirely with too many tabs open and too many wasn’t many).
Imagine how miserable will be the experience to use 2010 computer with modern web and modern software!
I remember once I was forced to upgrade the old PC because it couldn't play YouTube video smoothly after they updated used codecs.
Now a price per box has to be figured out, so that enough boxes can be sold per month to cover those costs.
It's not an accident that my company migrated to three clients in the space as they all met Postman's fate, and we're probably going to migrate to a fourth one soon. I'm surprised Postman is still around, but I'd be even more surprised if it's doing well.
You can use whatever version you've had for a year forever.
So if you cancel your subscription, the old version still works (and is probably fairly functional).
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The problem that Jetbrains had before the subscription model change is that major upgrade versions (that you paid for) were driven by accounting needs rather than engineering. "Need more money?" - release the version that is currently getting built, even if it doesn't offer compelling value. "Got some neat things for the next version?" - hold off on releasing it to customers until the company needs more money.
The subscription model made it so that accounting had a stable and predictable revenue stream and engineering could release things as features were developed.
Buy 1 year continuous and you get forever access to that version.. or you can keep paying for upgrades on a subscription
..its also worked out incredibly well for them profit-wise
Once you're providing your product as SaaS, the incentives for you to gatekeep features behind higher tiers of subscription become very strong. Similarly, the incentives to create lock-in become much more prominent than they are if you only get paid again if they liked your product enough to buy the next version, too.
And, in all likelihood, the extra money—the difference between "how much we need to continue to provide a high-quality product (including dev salaries)" and "how much we're charging you"—is going to pad the execs' bonuses and fund stock buybacks.
I would love to see there be a middle ground—where any piece of software that makes sense to have as SaaS can be provided as such, for what it costs to make it plus reasonable profit, at a high quality, and the dark patterns are disincentivized through regulation and/or through voting with our wallets.
Unfortunately, given the political climate we live in, that's not going to happen any time soon. So for me, personally, by far the best choice is always going to be to pick software I can buy once and own forever, and if I want the next version I can buy that.
Well then let's start recognizing it right now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co...
> Why I (A/L)GPL
> Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.
> If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you.
> If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.
> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.
> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.
https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
> To the Beggar Baron, open source's value is its free donation.
> You would never stand on the street and offer to buy the wallets off people who are about to donate a few dollars to you. That'd be stupid.
> They're giving you their money for free. Take it and run.
Always slap AGPLv3 onto everything you make. Always choose the most copyleft license imaginable. Permissive licenses yield zero leverage. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved.
You mean creates the problem not know which version you have tomorrow. Great if all your tutorials are obsolete because of a sudden UI change
And when you release a new feature, it benefits new users right away and you get paid for those features right away. You don't have to wait for a new version to ship. And consequently, you get feedback right away, which means you don't stack bugs on bugs only to find out at release time (this is basically agile vs waterfall).
Subscriptions are essentially the only sensible pricing model for anything with regular, frequent upgrades, and until we can make self-hosted software as easy and reliable as SaaS software (for the same cost) then we aren't going to see very much software distributed to end users (lots of software has gone the other direction though--e.g., office suites).
If they took a reasonable investment and kept a reasonably sized team, they wouldn't have to charge for a curl GUI what Adobe charges for their entire suite of industry-leading creative tools.
Currently the only SaaS product that still makes sense are LLMs, but this is temporary - anyone with sense realizes that the ideal situation is to run an open-source LLM model locally and privately, but this still requires a significant investment in high-end hardware and IT technical people.
That's the basic calculation: is it overall more efficient and less expensive to hire a skilled IT team to manage your in-house solutions, mostly open-source, including security patches, than it is to rely on external providers who charge high monthly fees and use all manner of sneaky tactics to keep you locked into their products? The latter is going to win in the long run.
However, what I understand is that this level of on and off of subscription is very difficult.
Classic enshittification. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to evade it.
I think the path forward is to unbundle them.
We're already solving #1. Nix has the best potential to become that declarative & stable layer, letting us reach the goal of treating cloud providers as the simple commodities they should be (I wrote about this approach here: https://ryanrasti.com/blog/why-nix-will-win/)
The bigger, unsolved question is #2: how to build a viable business model around self-hosted, unbundled support?
That's the critical next step. My hunch is the solution is also technical, but it hasn't been built yet.
I very much resent the subscription model--it is terrible for the consumer and it's crept into everything and it's just disgusting.
fidotron•8h ago
drob518•8h ago
MontyCarloHall•8h ago
The monkey paw curls. Now we live in a world where software is nothing but service contracts and more closed than ever.
deadbabe•8h ago
pjmlp•7h ago
fidotron•7h ago
Indeed, and that software ends up optimized for service contract billing potential over usability.
cnnlives69•7h ago
While we could not prove anything, it would seem that intellectual property theft just happens.
Today, we use tools daily that probably function because of intellectual property theft.
While this is traumatic to me, if I really try to be objective, aside from the additional theft of art, I don’t see how this is much different than what RMS and FSF stood for. Data finds a way to free itself.
Nextgrid•5h ago