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

[Bob Kline]

Add in that a lot of software is
written in India, EU, etc.  It's
simply a more competitive world
today.  You could sell anything in
1982, when the PC hit town, but
today there is lots of competition,
and as you say, the OS is free now.

But as someone else mentioned,
custom packages - circuit design,
things like Mathematica,  and CAD
and CAM programs in general - still
cost.  And they are typically not garage
shop products - they require lots
of programming and topic knowledge.
Even games are big business today.
No one much care about "pong" and
Packman today.

The answer here might well be no,
unless you have a really big idea, and
just want to do the idea development
in a garage.  For anything more mundane
there are a lot of people scrambling for
the same business.  And they'll do it
more cheaply if they are in India...

   -- Bob

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> 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?  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.
>
> 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. (Don't talk to me about ad
> revenue; That's the biggest hoax since Duke Nukem Forever was
> announced.  Only the most popular websites earn real coin off of it,
> which leaves your niche applications and any competitor without a good
> marketing team out in the cold.)
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> And what happens when someone's parole conditions require them to not
> use the Internet?
>
> --
> :wq
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