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

[Matthew Seeley]

>> 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.

I don't know if a video game counts as "Mass Market Software"  but 2D
Boy is just two people, and they've been incredibly successful selling
copies of their "World of Goo" game (which runs on Windows, Mac, and
Linux, and contains absolutely no DRM)

http://2dboy.com/about.php

I certainly think it's possible to do, as long as the software is
priced realistically. The software I see most pirated is the software
that's way overpriced, (Microsoft Windows / Microsoft Office / Adobe
Creative Suite not worth X-hundred-dollars per copy), or on the low
end (SmartFTP costing $40 dollars a seat)







On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Adam Tauno
Williams<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
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