[syl_sau]

I'd predicate the answer to this question on a much more materialistic basis than the author : it's weird to sell software because it's doesn't really exist. I mean, it's barely tangible.

You can copy it indefinitely. It doesn't exist physically. It's much more natural really to buy, say, a painting or a house. You can hang it, see it, use it. You have exactly one house, exactly one of this painting. Software, compared to that, just feel lazy.

One could argue that most software in history did not really improve anything, and that true innovation came from advancements in hardware, which software just took time to adapt to.

[simonh]

How is that different from music, TV, movies. Is entertainment a real thing? What about education, is that a tangible commodity? That's the kind of thinking that lead Marx to his theory of value, and his belief in the parasitic nature of all economic activities except for making physical things.

[syl_sau]

Concerts and plays are a real things that happen in the real world. So is teaching. They don't exist in a virtual space where everything is duplicable ad infinitum and where the next machine is just as capable as the first. Do you pay for music and movies on the internet? I don't, and most people do not directly. They go through platforms because otherwise people just avoid paying for them. Copyright and the Internet are kind of conflictual by nature, you probably know that. I'm not saying it's good or bad, i'm just saying things on a computer... it's weird to us. Everything is scalable on a computer, nothing really is in the real world, it feels like cheating. To me the debate is really about proprietary software and and the nature of computers.

Where I live education is mostly free anyway, and artists are heavily subsidized by the state. Greatest artists of the past had benevolent patrons, for a reason.

Actually I'm fairly familiar with Marx, not in a classic leftist way though. Not sure he could have predicted the whole information industry thing but I've always seen the whole GNU/Linx/free software paradigm as the only True Communism™ that exists, and maybe that's why paying for software is a difficult thing.

[simonh]

Music is absolutely duplicable ad infinitum exactly in the same way as software. I really don't see a material difference between recording an album in a recording studio and writing a program at a desk, or writing a book for that matter. Amazon makes good money selling books digitally. In fact I could even argue that an MP3 file and an eBook or any digital content are forms of software you run on an interpreter.

As for the value in software, I used to work for a software vendor that developed planning software for cellular radio networks. It would load up effectively an image file of terrain data, with each 'pixel' representing a square of terrain giving a height, then there was a database of cell site locations, antenna heights and orientations, etc and it would generate maps of signal strength, interference, etc. Really cool stuff. A lot of the value in that software came from experience, expertise and real-world testing and validation by radio engineers.

A lot of high value software encapsulates a lot of expertise by people other than the programmers. Now I'm in finance, but the software we work with gets huge amounts of input into it's design and specifications and validation from the users and customers who put in a massive investment of time and energy and expertise to ensure the software is fit for purpose. That work absolutely adds value, without it the software couldn't exist or have any value.

The idea that software is some miraculous exception to economic reality is a mirage. Free software purists discount all of that, which is why libre software is irrelevant in so many product categories. All of that input, beyond just programming, has to be paid for somehow and the fact is commercial software is capable of rallying the investment necessary to pay for all of that and create useful products.

The libre movement also completely misunderstands the nature of rights. In principle yes the owner of a computer has the right to determine what software runs on it and how it executes, but equally we routinely give up our rights or accept restrictions on them in return for benefits all the time. When Stallman goes to work in return for being paid he gives up his right to stay at home with his family or go to a bar with his friends. He gives up the right to be intoxicated. In theory he has free speech rights to say whatever he likes, but certain forms of speech in a work place that would otherwise be protected speech will get you fired or prosecuted. Why should we not choose to give up some of our rights over our computers in the same way? Very few rights are absolute like that (not none, but very few), because we can reasonably choose to accept limits on them.

[syl_sau]

>I really don't see a material difference between recording an album in a recording studio and writing a program at a desk, or writing a book for that matter.

You don't write an album on the computer (unless you're a DJ, which is, one would argue, not real music). My point was that things on a computer all exists in a realm where you can "right-click > copy" things. Like, that's it. Still the initial point of building things in the real world, that you can see and touch, stand.

From the OP:

>Software is a great business because, if you can build something that’s useful and provides $10/month of value to someone, it’ll probably cost you a lot less than $10/month to provide that value to a second person. Multiply that by 1,000 and you’re getting paid to do a full time job, even if you only work 5 hours per week. Multiply that by 10,000 and you can retire in a few years. It’s an extremely high leverage business.

>This makes software a weird anomaly.

Yes, software is a weird anomaly, because everything is scalable, because you can right-click copy. Software is a miraculous exception to reality because internet and the computer space is, frankly, some miraculous exception to reality.

Though I may be biased you know, I work in architecture and the software is absolutely horrendous. The added layers of complexity just brings endless frustration -- although in more theoretical fields (like finance) it may work much better, I see your point.

Now I don't see highly-specialized software having a hard time being sold to customers. Most definitely these things sell like crazy, and make their owners ostentatiously rich, which is not the case of the OP. But maybe he should have talked about centralization and monopolies, a logical consequence of scalability, which is what happens when everything is constantly connected as it is on the internet -- because, again, the computer space is a weird space -- and how it makes it much more difficult for small players to gain traction. I use Blender whenever I can -- it is a fantastic software, capable of doing many things, and it's held up by a global foundation where all the actors of the industry play their part. I'm not saying it's the ideal business model, but it sure is the only software client I respect.

Going to work is not really "giving up rights" as much as it is not having the choice. On the computer space, you have the choice, all the time, that's why it's contradictory. Maybe we need to create a completely locked-down computing environment, maybe that's the solution.