I'm so tired of people saying stuff like this as if I should care. Go ahead, raise prices. If your product is solving a real problem, people will pay for it. If not, well, we didn't need you anyway. This is, incidentally, how capitalism is supposed to work.
If your business model doesn't work without you doing bad things, then it shouldn't work. You don't have a god-given right to make money and if you can't make money doing prosocial things, you don't deserve to make money.
Free software has been doing the right thing for decades. The internet of the 90s before everything was carefully tracked and to addict and display ads was better. There are lots of incentives besides money out there and if money is the only one you care about, I'm not on your side.
It isn’t necessarily that. What incentive do you have to risk your livlyhood for no compensation? For example there was a flaw with OpenSSL, the contributors would be on the hook for all the damages that businesses who used the affected software.
An operating system would be hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy. Look at how actual Engineers are licensed and bonded.
Usually the unethical things are designed to corner customers into spending more: DRM, proprietary game server hosting, etc.
The problem we have with capitalism now is that it is abused by large corporations who fight for their right to monopolize and abuse customers. What everyone else has lost is the right to compete without abusing customers.
Are you saying that the cost of software is artificially high because companies are unethical?
That doesn't really make sense: consumers value both price and ethics, and are often willing to pay a premium to companies they perceive as more ethical. If a company could come up with a product that's both cheaper and more ethical than their competitors', they'd easily win over all their competitors' customers.
It depends where you look, and what you consider to be unethical.
One example is the game Battlefield 4: Dice/EA does not release the server software, so in order to host a server, you must rent one.
This means that only those who have a private deal with the company can host servers, leaving people in places like west Africa underserved (no servers under 100-200ms), and giving those who pay to host servers unneccessary authority over players (arbitrary rules, reserved slots, etc.).
This creates an artifical market based on copyright, and allows Dice/EA to get more money by abusing their customers.
> That doesn't really make sense: consumers value both price and ethics, and are often willing to pay a premium to companies they perceive as more ethical.
Perception is not reality. One problem is that people have been trained via propaganda to respect copyright abuses like DRM.
Because there are enough people respecting these abuses, I am forced to accept the abuses as status-quo.
There are plenty of other cases where a company constrains their customers liberty in order to coerce them into paying more. It's a problem that is exasperated by blind anti-regulation policies and setting monetary increase as the ultimate goal and ethos.
If your business model doesn't work without you doing bad things, then it shouldn't work. You don't have a god-given right to make money and if you can't make money doing prosocial things, you don't deserve to make money.
Free software has been doing the right thing for decades. The internet of the 90s before everything was carefully tracked and to addict and display ads was better. There are lots of incentives besides money out there and if money is the only one you care about, I'm not on your side.