[yoyohello13]

Someone makes something awesome that people love, it gets bought by a giant company, the giant company extracts as much value as possible and discards the corpse, someone makes an awesome new version. This is the software lifecycle.

[plussed_reader]

So why am I still using and recommending VLC? Because it doesn't have to be that way.

In before the true scotsman of software lifecycles.

[yoyohello13]

VLC is developed by a non-profit (as far as I'm aware). I'm kind of interested in what the world would be like if all companies were non-profit.

[ToucanLoucan]

I mean Google started as a non-profit and basically defined the search engine and it's tools. Then it went private, continued briefly, and has slid more and more into yet another corporate rent-seeker ever since.

I don't even think it's necessarily profit vs. non-profit, I think it's private vs. shareholder ownership. Once the shareholder brain-worms take root, a company will set itself on fire to maintain the illusion of quarterly growth, because anything else is failure. Even if you somehow managed to dominate a market to complete exclusion of meaningful competitors, if you fail to grow, you are failing. That is fucking absurd. A company reaching a natural plateau of steady customers generating excellent profits is, by Wall Street's definition, a failed business. I'm reminded of Greta Thunberg's notion of "the fantasy of infinite growth."

For-profit entities certainly can do some sketchy things to ensure profitability, and that warrants skepticism. But you really only see the truly brain dead nonsense decisions from publicly traded corporations. Shit like laying off 2/3 of your staff because you had a less profitable period (not not-profitable, _less_ profitable!).

[JumpCrisscross]

> if you somehow managed to dominate a market to complete exclusion of meaningful competitors, if you fail to grow, you are failing

This is a trope in Silicon Valley, but it's simply not true. Most companies in a developed economy aim for a stable state, i.e. close to zero real growth with payments made to investors via sole proprietorship pay-outs, dividends and/or debt.

Now a growth company is worth more than a stable-state one, ceteris paribus, so there are incentives to promise it. If your promise growth and fail to grow, you are failing. That doesn't mean the company is failing. It's just mismanaged and likely misrepresented by its capital structure.

[ToucanLoucan]

I mean, fair point. But name a corporation that's publicly traded right now that isn't promising growth to shareholders? If they're all doing it, that's the status quo, irrespective of if they should be or not.

FFS, Amazon promises growth. Amazon! A company so formidable that even it announcing it's thinking about entering a market causes a small stock blip to any major companies in that market, because it's presumed they will fucking obliterate them.

[JumpCrisscross]

> name a corporation that's publicly traded right now that isn't promising growth to shareholders

The entire E&P sector comes to mind. For example, Marathon Oil "expects to deliver maintenance-level total Company oil production" this year [1].

Note that "publicly traded companies constitute less than 1 percent of all U.S. firms and about one-third of U.S. employment in the non-farm business sector" [2]. Most small businesses aim to stay small.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/101778/0000101778230...

[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/apr07/changing-business-volatili...

[cbsmith]

> I mean Google started as a non-profit and basically defined the search engine and it's tools. Then it went private, continued briefly, and has slid more and more into yet another corporate rent-seeker ever since.

Wait, when was Google a non-profit?

[ToucanLoucan]

Started as a research grant-based program at Stanford in 1995. Three years later it became a company after building the basic product to a launch-ready state.

[cbsmith]

Ah, you mean before it was called Google.

Honestly, the non-profit engine was not nearly as good as the one the subsequent for profit business created.

[remedan]

I think the author of VLC has shared the fact that they keep receiving offers to buy the project for some significant sums of money. They refuse to sell on principle.

It is difficult to prevent enshittification when it requires people to refuse to get rich. Most aren't willing to stick to their principles in the face of that.

[mindslight]

Because OP isn't actually describing the software lifecycle, but rather the business or services lifecycle. Our society is so steeped in the business imperative of creating ongoing reliance on services, often with such relationships being marketed as "software", that the two are commonly conflated.

[g-b-r]

The difference here is that the owners had always signaled to not want to do it