software as a commodity is really whack to me in my head. it used to be that almost everything was open source and everyone contributed communally to a product to make it better, in whatever way they could. its distribution is also on such a level that it could almost be described as a post scarcity market. so charging a fuckton for software is just weird to me. and everyone does it. especially now with video games and other software packages released early with essentially zero QA testing, forcing users to do labor to make the software work.
if the users have to do labor on the product, you are just subverting the communal open source way of how software should be for personal gain. its one thing to care about your labor being valued, but its a whole different thing when you ignore the user’s labor as well (all the while devaluing the project members labor for profit). if you have a near flawless product created by a handful of people, sure, charge a premium. but dont act like we should highly value your product when QA testing by users enters in the 10s of thousands of hours.
and dont let me get started on how awesome it is to work on an open source project of a highly used free utility. even if you do only a small part of it, it makes you feel like you made something better for hundreds of people, and well, you did! and the fact that its instantaneous, with no real scarcity involved in its distribution, it makes your impact felt. and sure, the dudes that crank hundreds of hours into the utility should get paid, but its just weird as hell to me to charge the end user for a communal project. it just aint right in my head from years of just doing open source communism.
As someone who works with computer technology, the thing that bothers me the most about this industry is how you'll have a dozen or two companies researching, developing, marketing and producing products that do the exact same fucking things. So now you've got ten different potential solutions that can get your job done. Great. Now you've gotta spend time researching and navigating compatibility, pricing, subscriptions, licensing, and other countless layers of obfuscation to make sure you're getting the correct tool. There has to be a better way.
In my dreams I imagine an open-source hub and server hosting platform funded by tax dollars where you can load free software for anything. From audio production, to accounting, to CAD and office software, to web security. Supported, quality software that is compatible and available to all. Standardize everything. Now anyone can leverage technology and turn it into wealth.
The raw power computing has provided to the ruling class is staggering. It has nothing to do with their intelligence or cunning. It's all because they've had the resources to fund and develop these tools and exploit them to the max. Providing a means for all people to use to this technology at will would bring about a revolution or Renaissance, of that I have no doubt.
Yeah, they saw that coming in the 80s, it's why rich hippies were the early tech bros.
Yeah, fuck all those assholes. Every tech billionaire should have all their assets seized. In minecraft.
There was such this cyber commune hyperspace techno highway dream shit coming from the same people that would then basically do 21st century enclosure acts in the 70s-80s. Reading old tech shit is fucking weird that way.