[GRLUG] Impact of subscription model on software development and use

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Mon, 2009-07-13 at 16:07 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> Is it there even a future a small company (I'm talking under ten
> employees) to make money writing mass-market software to be
> distributed any more?  

mass-market?  No, but I don't think there has been for a long time
already.

> Open Source has gotten incredibly good, and
> keeps taking more of the mass market away from closed-source small
> applications.  Serverside, just about any major piece of closed source
> software has an open-source analogue of reasonable quality, and that
> quality is picking up as we go toward the future.
> And then there's the Cloud; The only plausible approach to DRM these
> days is to control *everything* serverside, and only display a UI to
> the client.  For the sake of efficiency and control, the Cloud is
> absorbing more and more applications, and the largest web companies
> (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) have bought companies that developed web
> applications.  Microsoft acquired Hotmail years ago.  Google acquired
> Writely and a number of other companies' products.  I can't cite an
> example off the top of my head for Yahoo, but I expect there's one
> there.

So far I haven't seen any evidence at all (despite marketroid railings
and slashdot posts) that "the cloud" is even real.  It has absorbed some
very generic services from underpowered organizations, but that's about
it.  And much of "the cloud" is entirely friendly to Open Source; the
part that presents a virtualized host for you to run whatever you want.

> It seems the only way one can get paid to write software these days is
> derived from subscription model.  Either as part of a company that
> sells branding and support (Red Hat), or as part of a company that
> derives income from subscription services. 

Or through the traditional consulting role: get paid to make
modifications to software on an on-demand basis.

> So what's going to happen to our programmers when the only way to get
> paid for it looks like it's going to be a subscription-based service?
> What's going to happen to the people who actually *contribute* to
> desktop-placed open-source?

I'm not worried.  To me the cloud looks like DRM; this ominous thing
that is going to pull us all down and ruin everything.  I remember
sitting through a presentation when the DMCA was passed and everything
was doom-and-gloom.  Didn't happen, because the truth is *nobody* really
wants it too.

Remember WebTV, web-tops, thin-clients, etc... do you hear the word
"flop" over and over again?  Yep.  "The cloud" is the latest
incarnation.  It will absorb appropriate applications,  some people will
try to go cloud-everything and fail catastrophically.   There will be a
whole rash of articles about how the cloud was a total failure and over
blown.  It won't be a total failure, some parts will work really well.
But that is what will happen.  And everyone will get back to their
regular lives until the next "big thing" that is going to change
everything about IT [and won't].

> Sure, Cloud-based software is nice, but there are serious privacy
> issues that nobody has really addressed, and I know plenty of people
> who don't have the network connection to let them use modern web apps
> with regularity and reliability.  What happens to those people?

They continue to use the same software they use now.

> And what happens when someone's parole conditions require them to not
> use the Internet?

Then they can't get a job;  which, again, is pretty much just like now.