this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Vote with your wallet. Boycott rent seeking companies that lock away their IP and charge money for access to it.
For example, FOR ADOBE TO DESERVE MY MONEY EVERY MONTH, 100% OF THEIR TECHNOLOGIES SHOULD BE OPEN SOURCE.
The only rent I happily pay for is a good VPN.
God forbid a programmer be compensated for their labor.
I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what's wrong with lifetime purchases?
As a programmer, and an open source one paid handsomely, fuck subscriptions and asshole software companies.
How do you get paid handsomely for open source? What's your funding model?
The customers (multinational and middle size companies, ranging from telecoms, banks, governments, goods and services) pay for support and features of the software. Software has always bugs and CVEs that need fixing, or new features, or needs for securing its supply chain (with SLSA, SBOMs, etc).
There's a handful multibillionarie companies that follow this approach with open source: Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, VMware, etc. Particularly in cloud-native tech like Kubernetes and all that gets deployed on top of it.
If a technology is not open source it really doesn't exist anymore. Customers have learned from the last 30 years and run away from vendor lock-in (AWS, AKS, Google cloud services..).
Oh, I program with open source stacks too. I thought you were referring to a specific FOSS app or SaaS.
Well, my employer pays me to maintain 100% of the time a specific security project that is deployed on Kubernetes. The project is donated to the CNCF (part to the Linux foundation), and my employer doesn't push any of us in the team to work on any specifics, just to keep improving it in general. All development happens in the open, including slack chats, etc. (Would be happy to share the specific project, written in Rust mainly, but I don't want to doxx this specific Lemmy account :D)
According to Wikipedia, he's actually a criminal defense attorney in California, and also "The Fish", original lead guitarist for Country Joe and the Fish.
Mmh, and if I go by your nickname, you are Jason Kaye, influential hardcore DJ and dead since a year.
I also appear on any graph that shows the months between July and January abbreviated by the first letter of the month.
I’m actually a programmer. There are ways to compensate us that doesn’t force people to pay rent for our work.
You buy a pair of shoes, the maker is paid. Why do you have to pay the bastard every month?
Samuel Vimes nodding
This thread is about subscriptions. So I'd assume that when people talk about 'rent seeking companies' etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.
I am a programmer, and I get paid whether or not the product is bought. Shovel your dogshit somewhere else.
That's a pretty short term view though, no? Presumably if an expected revenue stream does not generate flow to supplant the initial capital outlay, said business will not be a going concern for long?
I'm not defending subscription models at all, they're corrosive to the economy, but your comment had me curious.
I am a tech consumer and enthusiast first. I am a corporate shill sellout second. I wish for bad practices in the tech community to die, even if it's my own company doing it.
My concern as an engineer is that the product gets made well. I have no say or control over how the business cretins and marketing scumbags decide to destroy the company through terrible unethical practices like charging SaaS for completely self-contained software.
The short term view is that you need to keep a company afloat. Businesses should fail if they deliver products in awful ways. Yes, if the company fails, I will lose my job, and that is okay. It would be through no fault of my own, or really even the customers who wouldn't pay for my company's product. It would be the fault of the business decisions that were made. And the product landscape would then open up after my company's failure. For example, if Adobe would finally fucking die then we may actually see better products on the PDF, and photo/video editing market. No more monopoly on sub-par creative cloud products.
The more realistic long term view is that software engineers will be okay if their company fails. The overwhelming majority are smart, get paid extremely well, and exist in a field that needs their manpower. They will be able to find a new job much easier than other fields. The tech community will not be okay long-term if bad companies cannot fail.
Completely understand your viewpoint. I'm also aware though that there is a heavy saturation right now (at least in the DMV, which has historically been a bellwether for the greater economy) of both IT and bioscience/biotech industries. Both fields that also require very smart, educated, and experienced workers. So, I'm saying that things can shift quickly, and workers are always on the losing end, so it pays to note how the winds are blowing, regardless of current status.
you are attempting to align the interest of a wage slave with owner of corporation, corpo owners literally tell workers they aint shit and they are easily replacement.
think game industry crunch and fire practice... after rockstar lays off GTA6 staff, you buying the game does not help the laid off guy
You're conflating two separate things. I make a distinction between understanding the inherent friction of Labor and Capital along with a broad and deep awareness of the stacked playing field, and also keeping oneself employed by necessity.
wage worker is never aligned long term with his employer... at best short term.
Yeah thanks for the insight
I don't think you did so i clarified. You essentially possited: "But ohh gee, if idiots don't buy this slop, company loses money, and developer loses the job"
See:
If enough people feel this way to punish the rent seeker, he has a choice to adjust his rent seeking model to appease the paying customer. If he fails to do so, that's a classic "free market" in the raw dog form, as it should too!
Your analysis entirely skips this key point, which is frankly the entire thesis for "vote with your money"
Most people aint here to get freebies for nothing, they will pay when it is proper to do so. But we will not be feeding a parasites. media and software is 100% discretionary so we have this choice here. rent and healthcare will require more rogue tactics.
I think your focus is too narrow and your anger and need for someone to be punished for the awful systems that we are forced to survive within are clouding your ability to see the larger picture specific to the necessities of survival.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you sound like you're speaking from a place of privilege, and I am allowing room for the realities of this current-state existence.
As I said, conflating two separate things. It doesn't void the validity of either to acknowledge them.
If you punished this corpo for rent seeking, you are hurting the wagies 🤡
Adobe still has lifetime purchases?
yeah, https://1337x.to
Between you [and] the developer there is a mega corp... Programmer is paid a salary. Corpo pays bare minimum for labour. It doesnt matter if you buy product personally or not.
With that being said if everybody did the same, it would hurt the corpo but thats the goal... They need to get their act together and while idiots keep paying blindly, they wont.
This doesn’t really make sense. Programmers are usually just paid a salary. My salary is the same regardless of how many subscribers there are. I don’t give a shit. If everyone started pirating everything it wouldn’t really impact my job. There’s plenty of dev work to do.