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.
Also, markets often do come up with better, more ethical alternatives — but only after society pushes back against the harmful defaults. Ecologically, people used to say there was no alternative to burning oil or dumping waste into rivers. That didn’t make those practices okay — and change only came because they were first criticized, regulated, and in some cases outright banned. Progress doesn’t start with “there’s already a perfect alternative”; it starts with “this is no longer acceptable.”
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)
How is that rent seeking?
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 am curious, have you had any moment of insight following your initial comment?
OR is this the hill you die on?
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Under an ideal economy and politics, we might use taxation to fund OpenSource projects that are in the public interest : just as we used tax to build road, rail, bridges, and other widely used shared infrastructure.
It would not be the end of competition or capitalism if we did this - similarly we should fund science and engineering research, and that could include funding development of OSS projects indirectly.
I know YC say they invest in business models built around open source, and open source can work as a marketing sales funnel toward paid SaaS premium features. It would be nice to have some analytics on what hybrid OSS/SaaS biz models work well in practice.
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.
Because that's the incentive, particularly with products that are naturally fading and ceasing to make new sales.
> 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.
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.
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.
In a prior role, I was responsible for figuring out the best way to deliver a docusign-style experience that integrated with our product. After having conversations with two of the biggest vendors (DocuSign/Adobe), we decided the constraints of their APIs were causing too much friction with how our product/customer wanted things to work. We went with a fully in-house solution.
In most situations, trying to reinvent something like DocuSign is a terrible idea. In this case especially so since often you are using it simply because it is trusted (not because it is technically superior). In our case, the product was already installed and deeply trusted by the customers. They would have gone along with DocuSign, but they also had no problem with us doing it first-party.
Ultimately, it was a lot of up front work to get this implemented, but the customer absolutely loves it. We had to make some minor tweaks to how it functioned and that really highlighted why this was a good path. If we had gone with DocuSign, Adobe, et. al., that minor tweak would have turned into a major refactor and hack around shitshow.
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.