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.
But I guess my software can work with only some changes or I suppose even without some changes on pure node/bun/deno as well
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 $1, I rely on competition to create the consumer surplus.
Every commercial company is free to charge whatever they want, it's not rent-seeking (unless there is a monopoly, but your argument is applies to small companies as well).
And yes, the fact that you cannot find the software you need for the pricing model you like sucks.. but it is not rent-seeking. And the fact that my local Home Depot does not have cheap, but reliable refrigerators is not rent-seeking either. At worst, it is collusion between manufacturers.
Many companies don’t have a prem on which to run.
This is very specific contribution in economic productivity, as the company gets no work done when the communications system is down.
I doubt anything has literally perfectly zero contribution.
I kind of like this idea personally instead of electron
Start with a few services at ~10$/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.
Software pricing is a reflection of the fact that it's not a consumable good and the humans that make it have ongoing expenses like rent— not necessarily that it's hosted. Even in the bits in a box days the business was built around recurring revenue, you could choose to not buy the next version but it implicitly relied on most people not doing that.
In the bits in the box days, quite a lot of the world was skipping version numbers. That was a huge reason for SaaS pricing in the first place. Worse boxed software generally needed some improvement to justify upgrading, SaaS is heavily optimized for rent seeking.
But I can rent a dedicated server at hetzner, use ssh and set it all up. No need for a staff.
The difference is the dedicated server setup requires domain specific knowledge.
If the project needs to scale, a SaaS will become a huge cost in the overall operation and having a dedicated server is much better.
Hiring staff is still cheaper than paying a SaaS, at large scale.
You can pay for a lot of seats with a $70k salary and that's on the very low end.
If you account for opportunity cost you have to be very large before on-prem becomes worth while or your time must be worth so little that you're probably better doing another business.
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.
Please, can anybody enlighten me I suppose? I build a lot of side projects, some of which are genuinely cool and I can genuinely see it being a "saas" but like you, I hate saas from a consumer perspective and I love saas as a guy wanting to earn money so my ethics are definitely questionable at the moment.
Also, let's say I want somebody to buy my software. How does that make sense? What if they just redistribute that software without my permission. Doesn't that just eat into the profits when Saas couldn't.
And also I personally am a foss advocate and as you said its economically bad.
I am kind of thinking of creating software which is just source available and that you need a permission / license which you can get by github sponsoring me but I saw this one project doing it and the people in hackernews were pitch forking the poor guy. Its so crazy and bizarre that once you actually try to provide "some" value. You are automatically the bad guy for not using MIT.
I am also thinking of such a license where its SSPL if you don't have a license or BSD/MIT if you have a license (sort of like redis-ish)
But I am not sure if people would buy them. Maybe I can support both I suppose? I am not sure lol, which is why I wanted to get enlightened
PS: I built a way to create your own cryptocurrencies for genuinely free (no jokes)(not sure how to monetize and if, If anybody can help, that would be great!) and a way to get blogs from youtube posts and a way to youtube community post and videos as an alternative to google photos for unlimited storage (though the privacy aspect for community post is a little bad but I guess I can fix that as well)
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
Likewise .. if you can get your data in a standard format and walk away, you are not locked-in.
Customers tend to feel less aggrieved when they have access to their data - too many SaaS platforms dont allow this.
As someone who wants to monetize his side projects, I am not sure what I should do.
Should I make it 1) open source under permissive license (MIT)
2) open source under restrictive license (AGPL/SSPL)
3) source available and only permissive if you pay me a license (like how redis did it in the middle but actually this time , instead of changing license after project is already famous, I do it from the start of the project)
4) not make its source available and distribute a binary for fixed one time.
5) I do any of the above things but with primarily supporting saas? and supporting the ability to move out as you mentioned
Currently, most of my software that I write is just open sourced with MIT and I just private the software that I think has value.
The problem is, you'd be foolish to run your own thing in the early days of a company. It's only when you've succeeded and scaled that it becomes a problem. You survived long enough to need to scale in part by keeping costs low and one way you did that was by using SaaS services instead of building and/or running versions of those tools yourself. That was smart.
As the business grew at least one or two of those SaaS services got so entwined into the daily operations of your company that there is now no way to replace them without a lengthy, risky, and expensive migration project.
The SaaS problem is a negative side effect of your success.
edited - a typo and a word change
Who doesn't like it, should promote that upstream gets more than bug reports and push requests, as means to pay their bills.
As a former freelancer most of the software I still pay for has a model in the form of: Pay 350 € once, get 2 years of updates and use it as long as you like. If you want new updates after you get a reduced price of 120 € for an extension period.
This is my favourite license model for commercial software since it gives me maximum planability of my expenses and it gives the software company an incentives to add substentially useful features with new updates instead of just collecting rent.
dasil003•17h ago
pistoriusp•17h 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•16h ago
pistoriusp•16h ago
yed•12h ago