[OutOfHere]

You shouldn't, because that 20% more will not go to the engineers; it will go to parasitic management. Money is better if paid for services than for software. I would find well-maintained open source software instead, perhaps contribute to one, or put in the effort to develop one.

[Thorrez]

If I'm choosing between 2 products on the market, if I pay for the higher quality product, that's going to increase that company's revenue. That will either allow them to pay the existing engineers more, or hire more engineers. The lower quality product won't get my revenue, and thus won't be able to do that.

More revenue -> company grows

Less revenue -> company shrinks

[OutOfHere]

Open source software has no revenue at all, yet it often is superior in many ways.

[Thorrez]

That's a different situation from what this conversation was about. The conversation was about if there are 2 for-profit products, one costing 20% more than the other, would paying for the more expensive one provide money to engineers or not.

Regarding the new conversation topic: some open source software does have revenue. Forms of revenue include: donations, selling support, selling licenses that are less restrictive than the original open source license, ads, and selling addons. Yes, revenue for open source software is generally less than for-profit software, and despite that the open source software is often higher quality. I didn't claim that a higher quality product will always have more revenue than a lower quality product. I just made a claim about where the money goes.

[OutOfHere]

I think we're getting somewhere now. The solution could be to fund the developers of open source software, actively paying them to implement the desired features that otherwise don't get picked up (while maintaining good quality and their continued ownership over the software). Micromanaging them as employees wouldn't work.

[bruce511]

I agree with your idea. I'm working in Open Source. How much money can you send me please?

The above statement of course raises more questions than answers;

A) you believe Open Source should be funded. Are you willing to be a funder?

B) do you believe me when I say I write Open Source? (You shouldn't, I don't)

C) since you won't be managing this project, can I assume you'll just hope the feature you want will materialze at some point? In the form you are hoping for?

D) will you fund "any" Open Source, or only the OSS you are using? Or want changed?

[brazukadev]

it is the same conversation: quality software. Revenue/pricing are NOT the main signals of software quality at all.

[godelski]

I'm not sure this really matters at this point. It's like filming yourself giving food to the homeless. Is it better if you didn't? Yeah, probably. But at the end of the day does that person have food when otherwise they wouldn't? Also yeah.

I'd rather take a step in the right direction than none at all. If the management can be convinced that there's more money to be made this way then that gives us engineers more power to convince them to solve other such problems. If they care about quality then that gives us back negotiating power. You don't outsource to a third world software mill or AI when your concern is quality. But you do when you were trying to sell the cheapest piece of shit that people will still buy. So yeah, I'm okay with this

[OutOfHere]

You can be okay with it, but it's not going to solve the problem. Management will fix the issue, then soon revert to enshittification and exploitation, so your next major issue will stay unfixed. In the best case, your software will become an annual subscription where you've to keep paying an obscene amount for no new features at all. Overall, it would be a step in the right direction, but only a single step.

> You don't outsource to a third world software mill or AI when your concern is quality.

That's a disastrously fallacious set of presuppositions. A good engineer will use AI well to improve their software, whereas a bad engineer will use it to produce junk.

[godelski]

  > but it's not going to solve the problem

I believe I explicitly stated just as much.

I want to stress that this is a highly complex problem that needs to be solved and that means we need to break it down into smaller manageable tasks. You're not going to change everything overnight, a single person won't change things, nor will a single action change things. There's no clear definitive objective that needs to be solved to sole this problem. Nor is there a magic wizard in the tower that needs to be defeated.

In other words, I gave you my explanation for why I think this can be a step in the right direction (in a sister comment I said even more if you want to read that). But you have complained and given no alternative. Your only critique is that it does not solve the problem in one fell swoop. That was never an assumption I made, it is not a reasonable assumption to make (as you yourself are noting), and I explicitly said it is not an assumption being made. Do not invent problems to win an argument. All you've done is attempt to turn a conversation into an argument.

  > it would be a step in the right direction, but only a single step.

So don't stop after one step.

  > That's a disastrously fallacious set of presuppositions.

Read more carefully. I did not say "use AI" I said "outsource to AI". There is a huge difference in these two things.

Do we need to fight or can we actually have a discussion to help figure out this problem together? You do not need agree with me, contention can be beneficial to the process, but you do need to listen. I have no interest in fighting, so I'll leave the choice to you.