One of the issues here that wasn't mentioned, facing independent developers, is the almost pathological tendency of some people/groups in the F/OSS community to clone any even mildly successful product for no particular reason. I'm a big fan of free and open source software (especially when it's genuinely new or fills an actual gap, like the GNU tools and Linux), but there are times I wonder whether there are a lot of vested interests out there who would like to drive the cost of software to zero and make us all work for a wage providing 'services'.
There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin.
Between the ideologues like Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself (I know his position is supposedly more nuanced than that, but free software effectively amounts to this if you have to hand out source to all and sundry) and the open-source-friendly companies like IBM and Google - who have every reason to drive the $$$ available off software to zero, it's easy to feel a bit beleaguered.
To clarify my point, my problem is not with open source in general, it's with 'feature-by-feature clones of an innovative piece of software'.
The process of building, say, VisiCalc is a lot riskier and harder than turning Excel into Libre Office Calc. If Bricklin had known he was going to have to compete with free in a matter of a few months after release, he might have done something else entirely.
This may be hard to understand for people that haven't ever designed anything difficult, but frankly, it's _so_ much easier to clone something than build it the first time. Even just knowing that something is possible is a huge leg up.
If you think routinized F/OSS cloning of software is an actual service to innovation, you need your head examined. If nothing else, it makes going into a patent frenzy with every idea far more tempting.
It's hard for me to prove a counterfactual, of course, and show all the wonderful things that have been discouraged by the prospect of immediate shitty open source clones.
I fully accept that open source allows us to build innovative things on top of other software layers - it's not necessarily all bad. But it's not necessarily all good either.
Aren't you basically saying that whoever came out with the original software idea should be given an amount of time where they can profit from it without worrying about competitors? Like, say, a software patent?
No. I'm not seeking to change to world or propose any new systems, and I find software patents objectionable. I just don't like the uncritical celebration of F/OSS as always helpful to innovation when there are clearly cases where it is a mixed blessing.
So you think Excel was an "innovative piece of software" in the first place? It wasn't. Many spreadsheets existed before that.
A much more practical angle: there is no MS Office or equivalent for operating systems such as Linux and BSD, so the OS people had to write their own.
To be honest I think the developers of LibreOffice are heroes. Not many people in the open source scene want to be seen working on 'boring clone' projects like an office productivity suite, and would rather innovate. But the fact is, it is a necessary evil for many users, and the availability of OO has helped Linux adoption a lot.
You appear not to have read the post you are responding to. I'm particularly baffled as to why you are reassuring me that other spreadsheets existed pre-Excel given that my post mentions VisiCalc and Dan Bricklin. As we used to say in high school: "No shit, Sherlock".
Nor are you making a germane response to my post, which is not that LibreOffice is bad and Excel is good, but that if the creator of Visicalc had been in the situation where a few short months after he created his spreadsheet someone was going to clone it and give it away for free, he may not have bothered.
For a long time Excel was/is the best (feature-wise, UI) spreadsheet program out there. Even if OO/LibreOffice or other F/OSS have duplicated most of the functionality, it still makes sense to get an actual licensed copy if you need it for business.
To the grandparent poster, even if F/OSS is copying features, you still have the advantage of being first mover; it just means you have to keep updating and refining. There is also the non-trivial advantage in being paid to do this work. Moreover, if customers find it better to just switch from your product, incurring inevitable transfer costs, there is something wrong already.
One way to think about a FOSS clone is for it to take out the bottom level of (potential) customers from you, the one's that are never really satisfied, don't want to pay the full price etc. One's for which the ROI is negative (counting in support time etc).
So sure there might be a FOSS clone of your product, but they would only be copying the features that you've currently got, not the ones which you are developing. Could almost think of it as a lite version.
This is of course only one possible way of thinking about it.
Yes, they are annoying competition, but FOSS competition is ethical.
You may feel like they are hurting your piggy banks, but you certainly have no ground in going after them.
In any case, I don't think people should worry too much. FOSS developers often work for free, and they probably sucks at doing the hard bit of advertising, documentation, and finding out what users find hard about it.
If you can't compete with hobbyists, you have no business in being in that field.
Bollocks. F/OSS, when most effective and disruptive, is often the product of other corporations out to drive the value of a component that they don't make to zero, to free up resources for the stuff that they actually do.
I think it's better to think of OSS as commoditizing infrastructure. OSS hasn't been very successful at developing finished, end-user applications and there is still a healthy market for polished, professional apps.
Honestly I think the bigger threat to the indie developer is big companies dumping products on the market at rock-bottom prices and making up the difference with ads and addons. When everybody is used to paying a dollar for Angry Birds it's very difficult to charge a more reasonable price for other software.
I couldn't agree more. People sometimes seem to clone stuff because they think they're 'sticking it to the man', when in fact they can only do this because they work for a corporation during the day. And the 'man' they are sticking it to is actually an indie dev trying to get out of wage slavery.
I think open source is clearly critical to the modern software ecology, but I wish people would think
carefully about why they are doing it in each case, rather than assuming their actions are automatically benign because of a sprinkling of 'open' dust.
I wonder whether there are a lot of vested interests out there who would like to drive the cost of software to zero
Yes, I would like to drive the cost of software to zero, for the same reasons that I would like to drive the cost of energy, housing, and food to zero.
and make us all work for a wage providing 'services'.
This is in fact how most developers are paid today. It's a relatively small minority that's writing software for sale to end users.
There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin.
And that's good. The market has figured out that using a proprietary programming language is a very bad idea. And by reducing the costs of development software, the demand for developers is increased.
>Yes, I would like to drive the cost of software to zero, for the same reasons that I would like to drive the cost of energy, housing, and food to zero.
Then you're going about it exactly backwards, the worst possible way.
Wages/prices are driven by perceived value and constrained by price floor. If you want me to work for free then you first have to get energy, housing and food to be free. As long as I have to pay, I have to charge. What kind of stupidity leads one to first kill wages instead of rent seeking?
>This is in fact how most developers are paid today.
So what? The reason many of us are in this field is because it is one of the few left where we have the potential to escape wage slavery. If you want to close that door expect to meet resistance. You're basically telling us all to get back in the mines and stop dreaming about the future.
I wouldn't assume most developers are paid for providing services, there's an awful lot of developers out there writing code for products used internally or as part of a projectthat is sold at a significant price to very large customers.
I'd almost say that most developers are paid to write software and not provide services. Though it really depends who you refer to as 'end users'.
there's an awful lot of developers out there writing code for products used internally
Exactly. I consider that to be more on the "services" side because the ultimate goal is for Bob to get his TPS reports, not to produce a J2EE reporting framework.
A better way of expressing my point would be that most developers aren't in competition with open source; it's much more likely that open source software allows their jobs to exist.
Microsoft, EA, Apple, Valve, Blizzard, Riot Games, all microtransaction-financed games, every iphone developer that sells their game instead of using advertisements for income, they're all developing software that make money off that initial software purchase.
I think his point is that developers provide the service of development to their employers. Employees at Microsoft, Apple, Valve, etc. don't really make a significant amount of their wage from sales, they make it for hours of work. In other words the argument is: "what is the difference between contracting for someone and working for them full time?" At the end of the day its just you providing a service for some period of time, compared to actually writing your own app and selling it on the App Store.
The subtle counterpoint would be in companies that hand out stock options,where there is a sort of indirect correlation between the sale of a unit and your wage.
I think it's easy to get this impression but the reality is that there are many thriving software businesses with mature open source alternatives.
I work for Atlassian. Our two biggest products are a wiki and a bug tracker. We have dozens of open source competitors. There is also a long list of commercial competitors. Many of our commercial competitor started up in the last few years and they seem to be growing or at least they haven't gone out of business.
Most proprietary software isn't any good, either. The difference is that bad proprietary software dies. Bad open source software "lives" on in graveyards like Sourceforge.
Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself
This is just lazy. Stallman's position has literally nothing to do with money.
Also I don't really understand the rest of your post:
Linux and the GNU tools are clones, especially the GNU tools. And free software commoditizing certain classes of software is a good thing since we don't have to reinvent the wheel a billion times. Without free software "clones" it would have been massively difficult for products like OSX to even exist.
There are still "commercial" programming languages being created (off the top of my head: F# and Q) and I'm having a hard time coming up with any commercial language whose success was damaged by free software clones.
Can you give any concrete examples here? LibreOffice is still crap compared to (also kind of crappy) the MS Office Suite. If we all had to pay for IIS and SQL server the web would be much much smaller. Where is the damage being done?
I believe under the GPL, you can sell software, you just have to distribute the source, that's true.
However, the message hasn't seemingly sunk in, as there are many people who seem to be followers of stallman who get up in arms any time someone sells open source software (even if they are distributing the source.)
I picked some at random awhile back and looked into them. Every single "shame" was a commercial company that was complying with the GPL, and was distributing source code to ffmpeg. (Running it as a separate process, not mixing the code.)
This didn't matter to them. They documented constantly harassing these companies, who would try to comply with their demands (most of which were not required by the GPL) and then would give up, because the demands would just escalate.
It was kinda like software terrorism-- harassing people for selling software that included -- sometimes as a small part-- open source code.
"Between the ideologues like Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself..."
Please quote him and provide us with the reference.
I am not familiar with his making such a statement. The free in free software has nothing to do with price, but has everything to do with freedom.
Richard Stallman, Free Software Free Society, 2nd Edition, Chapter 10, page 65, pdf edition: "Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible - just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on."
The key word here is "effectively". I am surprised that so many people need this spelled out, but I suspect that many of you making this identical point live in a bubble, far from the world of traditional commercial software development.
Many conventional software business models are unsustainable if you give away source code. Yes, there are always exceptions (where, typically, you have some closely related bit of software or IP you can charge for - think Pathscale with their libraries or Snort with their ruleset), and you can slave away chasing your product around with services until the End of Time.
However, there are a couple things you just plain can't do with open source - one is to prevent people from making builds of your software for free, and the other is to prevent your competitors from free-riding on your research efforts and duplicating your hard work for a much lower cost than it took you to create it. The only way you can prevent the latter strategy is to patent the living shit out of everything, which I also find objectionable. I don't like the idea of trying to prevent someone who independently invents the same idea after me from competing with me. This sounds like honest competition. He or she got the idea by thinking hard about it - not by looking at my code.
Another horrible weakness of F/OSS business models is that, in many areas, there are ridiculous mazes of interlocking patents, often covering many versions of the same thing. Putting your source code out there is like sticking your head into the patent troll's mouth and begging to be bitten.
"Charge as much as they wish or can" is fine up to a point, but you just plain can't, and any attempt to create a situation where you can charge more for the fruits of your labor than these crippled business models allow is treated as immoral.
An invented 'right to tinker' somehow trumps my (equally arbitrary and invented, in some senses) right to be paid exclusively for innovations that took a huge amount of work to come up with until such time as I choose to release them or someone else figures it out - or something better - too.
The (closed source) company I work for is full of grown-ups, our customers are fairly grown-up too :-) and if we are so benighted as to enter into a mutual contract where we get paid and no-one gets to see the source, it's None of Richard Stallman's Fucking Business, or yours.
I'm not taking away a freedom of his because I never would have invented a goddamn thing if I had to build things under the very limited range of business models possible in the world of F/OSS (note: I'm not hating on those models, just pointing out that they are not appropriate for every type of software).
I don't think it matters. There will be always rooms for you to make money. And if you are upset with it, it's like you are upset with a competitor that charges no money. Don't be upset with competition, it's what make our world better.
I'll give you an example: WordPress is Free and Open source. The PHP code that you write for WordPress must be licensed with GPL. Even with that, dozens and may be more of developers and designers are making mad money selling plug-ins and themes. There are free Open Source plugins and themes, too. There can't be a worse situation than that.
Figure out your market. Know what the clients are ready to pay for. Compete. Make Money.
Actually, Stallman is pretty clear in his stance. He doesn't care what kind of monetization scheme you use, but your customers have a right to see the source code. You could ostensibly only give the source out to paying customers.
You might argue "but then the client can take the source and change it and redistribute it", but how is that any different from real life? The fact that you can charge so much for scarce copies of physical goods is a flaw of physical objects, not a flaw of digital objects. The digital world doesn't support the monetization schemes of the physical. Fighting that seems to be a losing battle (see RIAA, MPAA, et. al)
That is not Stallman's stance. His stance is that you must give customers your source code as well as the right to modify and distribute that source code and products derived from that source code without limitation so long as they preserve those rights for others. That's a big difference.
But there is a reason: to provide a free / open-source version of a useful and successful product. This software commons may lower the value of competing commercial products but it provides value to everyone else (who can use and build on it without cost or permission).
The argument is that this lowering of the cost works against independent developers in favor of already large corporations who have other advantages to rely on (such as large marketing budgets, etc.)
The point is not that value isn't created - it's that the people creating it may not be thinking about who benefits from it and who loses.
If I make an open-source heart rate monitor, doesn't that benefit people who want heart rate monitors, hurt people who make for-pay heart rate monitors, and divert my resources away from solving anyone elses problems?
Your open-source heart rate monitor will arguably directly help more people than the proprietary ones (don't confuse open-source with gratis) because it can serve as a base for other solutions to different problems. What you actually did by developing your open-source equivalent was to employ your resources in a much more efficient way, distributing its returns across a much wider field.
It's true you hurt the very limited group of people who made proprietary monitors, but you benefited a much, much larger group much more than they could ever do.
It only hurts the monitor makers as much as any other competitor would. Even though they are competing against a competitor with a price of $0, that just means they need to make their product worth its price with extra features or specialization for clients. It only hurts a company that can't compete or improve, and that's a good thing for society.
Suppose I am a first mover, considering making the very first heart monitor, ever. Suppose that doing the research for this is going to cost me a huge pile of money. Suppose further that I know that all of the innovation in my product will be cloned by a competitor 6 months after I ship, who after I have established a design, market and framework for this wonderful innovation, will give away the product for free.
That's got to be good for society, right? I'm sure I'll just go do all that research anyway, because I'm a nice guy. And I certainly won't go off and patent the holy living shit out of each and every aspect of the monitor or anything nasty like that, because that would be bad, and we've already established that cloning products has to be an unalloyed benefit for innovation. Because it's, like, free or open or something.
This is the typical argument favouring patents and more broadly, intellectual property. I'm personally against all form of patentw, and for some severe restriction of copyright and trademarking. You could have a look at the book "against intellectual property" (right wing view :), or "against intellectual monopoly" (different, less liberterian view) they're quite partial but have some compelling arguments.
You're preaching to the choir. I'm not making that argument. I'm making the argument that always opening your source up removes a fairly thick line of defense against straightforward reverse engineering, and makes software patents seem more necessary.
There's always the prospect of reverse engineering, but it's a lot harder to do and there are situations where it seems rather unlikely. In enterprise software, particularly, it seems considerably less likely that a big company will perpetrate hard-core reverse engineering naughtiness when bound by a thicket of NDAs and contracts - why risk it? A quick browse through the opened source code is a rather different beast.
Also however cutting edge your research would be , it is would be most likely built upon on some of the research that is already done in the field. Any clone implementation (free or non-free) make use of the knowledge already is available in the public domain and improve in the direction your product is built on. More novel , innovative is your approach it would be as much harder for any alternative ways (free or non free) to catch up.
What you say doesn't in any way contradict the main point, except your unsubstantiated claim that it's automatically good for society.
Competing against a $0 product (which is essentially subsidized by corporate salaries) is likely to increase the barrier to entry. That will make bootstrapping harder, favoring existing enterprises. This is clearly not an unalloyed benefit to society.
The existence of a reasonable 'free' product may also deter the entrance of multiple competitors who would have advanced the state of the art. Clearly this is bad for society.
I'm not arguing that this always happens, or that free software is inherently bad. I'm arguing against the dogma that free software is always automatically good.
It's a choice with consequences and the dogma is an excuse not to think about them.
The existence of a reasonable 'free' product may also deter the entrance of multiple competitors who would have advanced the state of the art. Clearly this is bad for society.
That's not clear at all. If you can't beat a "good enough" free alternative in the market, that's a signal that society would benefit more if you spent your efforts elsewhere.
I'm arguing against the dogma that free software is always automatically good.
As a first approximation, it pretty much is. Would you care to name specific free software that we'd be better off without?
Gimp. If that didn't exist for free maybe someone would have created a product by now that actually competes with photoshop. Of course I can't prove this, but I'll offer the app store as supporting evidence. Look at all the photo editing software that sprang up as soon there was a place Gimp couldn't get to.
In the short term, but the free clone only exists from the innovation of indie developer. If he is put out of business then all the things he would have made that helped everyone even more probably wont be realized.
The sad reality is that if you make something of value, there are rotten people who will come and try to steal from you. The author thinks he's discovered something new. I don't think he has. "Patent trolling" might be a bit of a new angle but business has always been risky.
In some parts of the world, if you farm a little too much, gangs come by in rusty toyotas with AK47's and help themselves (and might kidnap your children for good measure). In our society, we've allowed these men to wear suits and pretend they are contributing members and in exchange, they no longer use guns. This seems like a valid compromise until we as a society outgrow this sort of behavior. (Here's hoping)
There are tools for managing risk. Create an LLC and have professional liability insurance. Sure bad stuff can happen. I had an over-zealous zoning official try to revoke the business license for my house because I was "manufacturing" software (and manufacturing is zoned industrial, donchaknow).
I wish there weren't patent trolls, but at some point you have to admit that you can't spend your life worrying about all of the bad stuff that could happen. Take a few reasonable precautions and then do your thing.
Actually, if they are suitably different, yes. It has the added benefit of making it easy to sell the product/business down the road or convert to a different kind of Corp to get investors.
If a product is good enough to make money on it's own, it's good enough for its own LLC.
OT: Is LLC better than C-Corp or S-Corp in CA? Isn't LLC mostly for real estate holding? What I have been doing is having a parent C-Corp and using DBA for individual product/company under it. I wonder whether I should switch to LLC.
LLC's are usually the cheapest and easiest to set up especially for an individual. The LLC does exactly that. Limits the liability to the corporate entity.
I don't think a dba does this. If any of your products incurs liability, the assets from the entire parent are on the line automatically.
Lawyers always try to get through the corporate barrier and get at your personal assets, or connect your companies to get at them all at once. (This even happened in the tiny trademark case I was involved in)
Having this done, and done right, its a big impediment to that happening. Don't mix your accounts, pay yourself a salary from each company and keep your papers in order.
He's got his history completely wrong. From the first days that home computers were affordable at all, there were tons of very small software shops. I recall purchasing programs from computer stores that came in poly bags containing a photocopied manual on card stock and a cassette tape with a photocopied label that had been glued on by hand. If you called the company for support, sometimes you woke the guy up.
Even if you are an indie one man shop you are in fact a business and there are risks. Same thing goes for being a lawyer or accountant or contractor. If you screw up, it could cost you financially in a very big way, even if you didn't intend to do anything wrong.
Even successful businesses can crumble, even billion dollar businesses can get beat up by litigation to the point it isn't even worth continuing.
To say that the sky is falling for indie devs is a bit silly. There are plenty of places you can build, innovate, distribute, and succeed. Sure, the iTunes App Store thing is big today, or maybe Facebook, or maybe Steam, or maybe Wii's downloadable channel, it doesn't matter. Any one of those could be gone in a year or two.
Here's an example, there are people out there who make millions of dollars selling e-books and mediocre/overpriced software on Clickbank right now. Some of those people get sued I'm sure for their products. More people show up. You could take the same ebook and sell it on Kindle or Nook if you got shut down or you could sell your software on the Mac App Store or Chrome Web Store if CB went under.
There are so many platforms to distribute and build software and businesses on now, it really is hard to complain about the death of the indie developer because there are so many new companies getting started every day on all these different platforms that didn't exist even 5 years ago.
As a business owner you can't control all risk, but you certainly can and should plan around them.
If one channel gets shut down, move on to a different one or a different product.
Great devs and great companies aren't built on one hit one time wonders.
The problem is that a lawsuit easily can take out a small developer. Even if the lawsuit is completely frivolous. I can't afford tens of thousands of dollars for a lawsuit. If I get sued my company is probably done. It doesn't matter if the suit has merit or not.
I haven't gone through this or anything, so maybe an actual lawyer would be happy to speak up in this thread. But my simpleminded understanding is that your typical frivolous lawsuit goes like this, only less transparently:
TROLLCORP: "We're suing your company for ONE MILLION DOLLARS."
CEO (through a lawyer, of course): "Well, oops, we've only got ten thousand in the bank plus a couple of old Macbooks. After that we're just going to declare bankruptcy and you won't see a dime."
TROLLCORP: "Well, okay, frankly, we don't want to see you go bankrupt. Bankruptcy court is no fun at all. We don't need to pay for a tedious legal battle. We just want the money. How about you just give us the ten thousand plus 5% of all future revenue from your products?"
CEO: "If I spend the ten thousand on a lawyer, I can file some motions to delay your lawsuit. Then I can go bankrupt. You'll get nothing then. So, how about one thousand bucks and 0.5% of future revenue?"
TROLLCORP: "Two thousand and 2%."
CEO: "Done."
As with any parasitic transaction, the parasite has no rational interest in killing you. Dead companies don't pay. The danger, of course, is that they won't be reasonable and will accidentally push too hard, in their attempt to convince you to search under more sofa cushions for loose change that they can take. Or that they are, in fact, happy to kill your company because they think it will be an instructive demonstration for the other companies they sue. Or that they will gradually consume your time and suck your blood and your company will eventually die of exhaustion in 2% increments. But, you know, this is why it's good to be a small company. Having nothing means having nothing to lose.
The "can't squeeze blood from a stone" defence is probably your best bet if you're a really small operation, but as you say you'd just better hope the patent troll is behaving in a rational manner & not trying to make an example of you. I would assume that a rational troll would only harass you if you were getting noticed & making a profit, but who knows what kind of reasoning goes on within the lizard hind-brain of your standard patent troll types...
But that situation is not anywhere near impossible. What's more, the patent system is there to serve a purpose, innovation, even (and especially) for the indie developers. Now, if that purpose is not served, which seems to be the case for software, it's time to lobby for governments to interfere, not to give up on independent entrepreneurship.
But keep in mind, the patent trolling industry can't take all the money, or there wouldn't be any more developers to sue. In this case, the parasite methaphor really is apt - if a parasite completely wipes out the host species, then the parasite goes extinct as well.
So yeah, the situation isn't impossible, because patent trolls need to keep the success rate high enough that new software entrepreneurs are tempted to try.
Right - there's probably nothing to stop a 'tragedy of the commons' occurring, and money is fungible so they can just do something else with it when the cash cow dies.
Both can be true. It really might be unprofitable to be an indie developer (after factoring in the risk and cost of litigation), while simultaneously being clearly 'time to lobby for intervention'.
Also, the risk/reward of lobbying for intervention may be vastly higher than is practical for people who would otherwise be indie developers, so in practice going to work for a large corporation might be the only way to spend your life writing software rather than being a patent reform activist.
The patent system had an important purpose during the industrial revolution, and I believe it still has a place for "hard" innovations that require years or decades of research before becoming marketable.
But for trivial cases like most software patents, it is just something to prop up the established big companies (and keep lawyers fed) at the expense of emerging players.
I'm happy I'm in Canada? I mean sure, I'm certainly not protected 100% - if a patent troll wants to roll across me, there's definitely cross-border agreements to allow that.
That said, it's certainly different from what they're accustomed to due to that cross-border issue, and thus a bit more difficult and there are probably much easier targets within their immediate legal jurisdiction.
Not that it it really matters for me RIGHT NOW, since I only just launched the other day and revenue is a future dream, but it still assuages my fear a little.
As a fellow Canadian dev, I'd urge you to assume the worst case scenario for litigation. Or at the very least, consult with a lawyer. Patents can be defended across borders. At the very least, your life can be turned into hell.
Surely there must be a way to simply ignore the lawsuit the way OJ Simpson ignored his civil lawsuit [1].
[1] Well, he had to move, but the point is he didn't pay the people who sued him a dime. This is what I would want to do; make sure the ones who sued me got nothing.
If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. It does suck that now independent developers have to also worry about patent litigation. However, it will not stop the most resolved developers from continuing forward.
On the bright side, patent trolls are patenting the most obvious patents right now. In 20-30 years all of those patent will expire. I'll be amazed if 20 years from now we will still continue to patent obvious things like one click button transactions. If so, we all deserve to go down the ship of financial failure since it is us, society, that allows such things.
Meanwhile, if we could only find the best ways to make patent trolls' lives more painful... At least it would dissuade the casual patent troll.
Looking at how things developed in other industries like movies and banks I'd expect laws to be changed so things will get simplified for big companies with deep pockets who can afford lawyers.
Small businesses don't have a lobby so congress won't help them.
I understand, but unfortunately short term (like next year) is hard to change that (or maybe we can we just haven't figured it out). It is still better to continue moving forward, we'll figure something out along the way.
I mean don't just give up. I don't know what will change, but things have a way to work themselves up if one continues to hammer at the problem. There will always be issues when trying to do something important. This is just another one.
And as I write this I realize that I sound a bit corny. The shame... (no sarcasm intended)
It's not particularly corny, and it's hard to disagree about not giving up in principle.
That said, human political systems can and do lead to sustained bad results. In my mind, 'things working themselves up' really means, 'someone finds and implements a solution'.
Meanwhile actual indie developers are as we speak, prevented from working on adding value to the economy because they are forced to spend their time and money dealing with trolls.
Unrelated, but interesting nonetheless: the current software industry has a strikingly similar feel to the early texas oil prospecting days.
Independents are suddenly able to take a little bit of risk, take on some money (then: banks, now: angels and VCs), and work by themselves or in small teams to produce something that lots of people need (then: oil, now: good software).
Some of the biggest fortunes in history were made back then (1900 - 1930s), just as some of the biggest fortunes are now being made in this industry.
The digger I deep (no pun intended), the more similar these two stages of history look alike. I'm sure there are other eras that also share these common threads.
What I'd like to see is a collective legal fund to protect devs from patent trolls. Like insurance, everyone pays into the system and if you need representation, high quality lawyers would be there for you. That seems to me to be the best solution to this problem short of abolishing software patents altogether.
No, you just have to make sure they understand that a lawsuit against you ends with a verdict from the supreme court after a long and costly legal battle.
In the days where software was distributed on magnetic media, such as reels of tape, cassettes, or floppy disks, it cost a lot of money to get the product to a customer.
One of us is misremembering. I seem to recall an interview with Gates and/or Ballmer where they talked about the realization that the cost of 5 or 6 floppies at wholesale was insignificant compared to the revenue from the software, that it was a no-brainer cost-wise. CDs were the first time when cost became an issue, iirc (again) because you had to pay for one or more masters to print the production copies. I'd feel better if his history was right.
This time the retail channel itself is very cheap, but the ancillary costs, both financially and emotionally, are very high.
And, of course, only large companies and publishers can bear these costs. My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one.
I can't even address the "emotional costs" he talks about, but there is a precedent for dealing with risks of this kind. For consulting engineers, it's called "errors and omissions insurance." It strikes me that if there isn't something like that for developers, one plausible reason is that this kind of liability hasn't actually been a problem. Is there errors and omissions insurance for developers?
From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees.
The author uses the phrase "from our experience," but I wonder what that experience actually is. At this point, it's not even anecdotal, because he doesn't supply the anecdote! We can't even begin to ask if his experience generalizes. For example, did he get good counsel? Was he actually infringing? Should he have settled? Did he avail himself of the FSF or ESF if applicable? Should his product have been more profitable?
I think I'm either blessed or cursed with too much curiosity to take this guy at his word.
>One of us is misremembering. I seem to recall an interview with Gates and/or Ballmer where they talked about the realization that the cost of 5 or 6 floppies at wholesale was insignificant ... I'd feel better if his history was right.
Sure, the cost of delivering a single copy of software to a given customer was relatively inexpensive. But Craig is talking about how, in the absence of the internet or other easy customer acquisition and distribution methods, the way you used to get your software to customers was by making thousands of physical copies, boxing them up in a nice shiny box with manuals, and have computer software and electronics stores display your software on their physical store shelves. And that's quite a bite of money to have tied up in inventory even though a single piece of media itself was relatively inexpensive.
>The author uses the phrase "from our experience," but I wonder what that experience actually is. At this point, it's not even anecdotal, because he doesn't supply the anecdote!
Craig is a very well-known developer and author in the Mac and iPhone developer community and works at Iconfactory. They're one of the first companies that was addected when the Lodsys patent issue came to light. Even if you didn't know that, the very previous entry on his blog is an open letter to Apple about the problems his company is having with the patent issues. It's a little disingenuous to call someone out about omissions in a blog entry while taking zero effort to familiarize yourself with any of their work.
It seems perhaps as disingenuous to think that because you know a (very) little bit about the Lodsys issue that the anecdote that all of a products profits can be consumed is true even in this instance. After all, Apple has been standing up in defense of individual developers on this issue.
This is not true. While this may be true in the future, Apple is not currently involved in the legal defense of companies involved in the Lodsys lawsuits and there is no timetable for which they will enter into such an involvement.
This is not true. While this may be true in the future, Apple is not currently involved in the legal defense of companies involved in the Lodsys lawsuits and there is no timetable for which they will enter such an involvement.
I know we're supposed to be civil and not say anything to anyone on here that we wouldn't say to their faces, but, well, but nothing. I'd say the following to your face.
Fuck you. It's out of line to call someone calculating and not straightforward when you have no idea what their actual motivations are.
> Is there errors and omissions insurance for developers?
Yes. I got a quote through Creechurch for E&O (along with liability) to insure my software dev consulting, but the cost is prohibitive for me right now. Maybe I'll do it when things pick up.
Here's the anecdote: "How much are you spending on marketing?" If the number is too low you won't even pass the retail gatekeepers.
There was a period earlier in the timeline(the late 70s and the start of the 80s) where one might succeed in breaking into retail without a large spend, but between then and the rise of cheap web apps and app stores, the market for independents was in shareware mail-order and downloadables, which have much higher purchase friction, and thus lower conversion rates.
Even magnetic tape reels were not that expensive..I seem to remember that RMS earning half of his expenses just from revenues of supply code by magnetic tape alone.
Does anyone have any statistics about the number of independent developers / startups that suffer a significant negative financial impact because of a patent infringement lawsuit? My gut feeling is that it's a very small percentage. A few years ago, I think Paul Graham wrote an article suggesting startups shouldn't worry about being sued because in practice it rarely happens to them.
Does anyone think that a legislation preventing NPE's from suing for patent infringement would be practical? They'd still be able to hold them - just not sue.
It seems like something that large corporations as well as independents could get behind.
How do you prove that an organization is an NPE? All they have to do is hire a couple of college kids dirt cheap and they can show that they are "developing" a product.
Denying patent protection to anyone who doesn't already have a finished product out on the market opens a whole new can of worms.
The law already deals with vague definitions. It really wouldn't be too hard to write something that erred on the side of making it somewhat hard to prove that you were practicing.
Well, the good thing about it is maybe this will force a "Silicon Valley" to finally appear in Europe where the odds aren't stacked so badly against the little guy.
It's really hard to want to continue reading when the third sentence says this:
Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980’s
I understand the point: that things are the more the same than ever, that this guy is a salty old sonofabitch who's forgotten more than i've learned, but seriously. Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980s other than the tools? The entire way we think about why we're building software and what we're trying to get out of has changed and is still changing.
Here's the problem: how do you feel about essentially donating your time and creative energy to patent trolls and defense lawyers? If at least there were some kind of public good, I could almost stomach it, but to see these vultures take away the benefits of my hard work, it would be incredibly painful. What makes this worse is that it almost seems to be a kind of roulette... but then again, that is a design feature rather than a flaw from the pov of the trolls. After all, if patents were easy to understand and predictable, people could easily see what is patented legitimately and what isn't, and sidestep the minefield. The system needs to be essentially random, opaque, and unpredictable to keep the industry stocked with fresh meat.
Seems like incorporating your company outside the US sidesteps a good portion of this danger. The more articles I read, the more appealing this is to me, were I ever to go into business for myself.
Yep, life as a developer in Europe is a lot less problematic, even though pay can be lower.
Of course the potential downside is that a patent troll can still block your sales to USA, or even get you into the situation where you can't travel to the country.
Small risk to take in exchange for creative freedom, I think.
What I am saying is that on that you dont want to think about what you will say to the judge even before building your product....if your product was really that successful tht you got patent trolled you will probably have the money to hire a lawyer to represent you.
I agree that we shouldn't stop building stuff because of this worry. Sadly we know by example that not everyone who gets hit by trolls has money for a defense.
a) whenever i comment on something on the internet I do not want to think about what legal implications it might have for a hypothetical legal dispute tht I might get involved in the future
b) We are assuming that the prosecution will be smart enough to figure out that samyzee on hacker news is in fact me.
c) To Hacker News: Please add a feature that lets me delete my comments!!
Our startup (http://infostripe.com) is built on independent spirit. So far we have been doing well. It's a struggle sometimes but always worth the effort.
It's true, I do mention my startup a lot. It's just that we are a small (aka unfunded) startup with lots of dev and little marketing.. when I see an article that is relevant and I have a thought on it I link to try and reach out. I don't have much time to really get into comments as I'd like. I read a lot though. I will try and find other ways to contribute.
There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin.
Between the ideologues like Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself (I know his position is supposedly more nuanced than that, but free software effectively amounts to this if you have to hand out source to all and sundry) and the open-source-friendly companies like IBM and Google - who have every reason to drive the $$$ available off software to zero, it's easy to feel a bit beleaguered.