Opinion Software Needs To Be More Expensive - Software, like coffee, is too artificially cheap, and we need to make it more expensive. I have one suggestion for how to do that.

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Saturday March 30, 2024

The Cost of Coffee​

One of the ideas that James Hoffmann — probably the most influential… influencer in the coffee industry — works hard to popularize is that “coffee needs to be more expensive”.

The coffee industry is famously exploitative. Despite relatively thin margins for independent café owners1
I don’t have time to get into the margins for Starbucks and friends, their relationship with labor, economies of scale, etc.
, there are no shortage of horrific stories about labor exploitation and even slavery in the coffee supply chain.

To summarize a point that Mr. Hoffman has made over a quite long series of videos and interviews2
While this is a theme that pervades much of his work, the only place I can easily find where he says it in so many words is on a podcast that sometimes also promotes right-wing weirdos and pseudo-scientific quacks spreading misinformation about autism and ADHD. So, I obviously don’t want to link to them; you’ll have to take my word for it.
, some of this can be fixed by regulatory efforts. Enforcement of supply chain policies both by manufacturers and governments can help spot and avoid this type of exploitation. Some of it can be fixed by discernment on the part of consumers. You can try to buy fair-trade coffee, avoid brands that you know have problematic supply-chain histories.

Ultimately, though, even if there is perfect, universal, zero-cost enforcement of supply chain integrity… consumers still have to be willing to, you know, pay more for the coffee. It costs more to pay wages than to have slaves.

The Price of Software​

The problem with the coffee supply chain deserves your attention in its own right. I don’t mean to claim that the problems of open source maintainers are as severe as those of literal child slaves. But the principle is the same.

Every tech company uses huge amounts of open source software, which they get for free.

I do not want to argue that this is straightforwardly exploitation. There is a complex bargain here for the open source maintainers: if you create open source software, you can get a job more easily. If you create open source infrastructure, you can make choices about the architecture of your projects which are more long-term sustainable from a technology perspective, but would be harder to justify on a shorter-term commercial development schedule. You can collaborate with a wider group across the industry. You can build your personal brand.

But, in light of the recent xz Utils / SSH backdoor scandal, it is clear that while the bargain may not be entirely one-sided, it is not symmetrical, and significant bad consequences may result, both for the maintainers themselves and for society.

To fix this problem, open source software needs to get more expensive.

A big part of the appeal of open source is its implicit permission structure, which derives both from its zero up-front cost and its zero marginal cost.

The zero up-front cost means that you can just get it to try it out. In many companies, individual software developers do not have the authority to write a purchase order, or even a corporate credit card for small expenses.

If you are a software engineer and you need a new development tool or a new library that you want to purchase for work, it can be a maze of bureaucratic confusion in order to get that approved. It might be possible, but you are likely to get strange looks, and someone, probably your manager, is quite likely to say “isn’t there a free option for this?” At worst, it might just be impossible.

This makes sense. Dealing with purchase orders and reimbursement requests is annoying, and it only feels worth the overhead if you’re dealing with a large enough block of functionality that it is worth it for an entire team, or better yet an org, to adopt. This means that most of the purchasing is done by management types or “architects”, who are empowered to make decisions for larger groups.

When individual engineers need to solve a problem, they look at open source libraries and tools specifically because it’s quick and easy to incorporate them in a pull request, where a proprietary solution might be tedious and expensive.

That’s assuming that a proprietary solution to your problem even exists. In the infrastructure sector of the software economy, free options from your operating system provider (Apple, Microsoft, maybe Amazon if you’re in the cloud) and open source developers, small commercial options have been marginalized or outright destroyed by zero-cost options, for this reason.

If the zero up-front cost is a paperwork-reduction benefit, then the zero marginal cost is almost a requirement. One of the perennial complaints of open source maintainers is that companies take our stuff, build it into a product, and then make a zillion dollars and give us nothing. It seems fair that they’d give us some kind of royalty, right? Some tiny fraction of that windfall? But once you realize that individual developers don’t have the authority to put $50 on a corporate card to buy a tool, they super don’t have the authority to make a technical decision that encumbers the intellectual property of their entire core product to give some fraction of the company’s revenue away to a third party. Structurally, there’s no way that this will ever happen.

Despite these impediments, keeping those dependencies maintained does cost money.

Some Solutions Already Exist​

There are various official channels developing to help support the maintenance of critical infrastructure. If you work at a big company, you should probably have a corporate Tidelift subscription. Maybe ask your employer about that.

But, as they will readily admit there are a LOT of projects that even Tidelift cannot cover, with no official commercial support, and no practical way to offer it in the short term. Individual maintainers, like yours truly, trying to figure out how to maintain their projects, either by making a living from them or incorporating them into our jobs somehow. People with a Ko-Fi or a Patreon, or maybe just an Amazon wish-list to let you say “thanks” for occasional maintenance work.

Most importantly, there’s no path for them to transition to actually making a living from their maintenance work. For most maintainers, Tidelift pays a sub-hobbyist amount of money, and even setting it up (and GitHub Sponsors, etc) is a huge hassle. So even making the transition from “no income” to “a little bit of side-hustle income” may be prohibitively bureaucratic.

Let’s take myself as an example. If you’re a developer who is nominally profiting from my infrastructure work in your own career, there is a very strong chance that you are also a contributor to the open source commons, and perhaps you’ve even contributed more to that commons than I have, contributed more to my own career success than I have to yours. I can ask you to pay me3
and I will, since as I just recently wrote about, I need to make sure that people are at least aware of the option
, but really you shouldn’t be paying me, your employer should.

What To Do Now: Make It Easy To Just Pay Money​

So if we just need to give open source maintainers more money, and it’s really the employers who ought to be giving it, then what can we do?

Let’s not make it complicated. Employers should just give maintainers money. Let’s call it the “JGMM” benefit.

Specifically, every employer of software engineers should immediately institute the following benefits program: each software engineer should have a monthly discretionary budget of $50 to distribute to whatever open source dependency developers they want, in whatever way they see fit. Venmo, Patreon, PayPal, Kickstarter, GitHub Sponsors, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Put it on a corp card, put the project name on the line item, and forget about it. It’s only for open source maintenance, but it’s a small enough amount that you don’t need intense levels of approval-gating process. You can do it on the honor system.

This preserves zero up-front cost. To start using a dependency, you still just use it4
Pending whatever legal approval program you have in place to vet the license. You do have a nice streamlined legal approvals process, right? You’re not just putting WTFPL software into production, are you?
. It also preserves zero marginal cost: your developers choose which dependencies to support based on perceived need and popularity. It’s a fixed overhead which doesn’t scale with revenue or with profit, just headcount.

Because the whole point here is to match the easy, implicit, no-process, no-controls way in which dependencies can be added in most companies. It should be easier to pay these small tips than it is to use the software in the first place.

This sub-1% overhead to your staffing costs will massively de-risk the open source projects you use. By leaving the discretion up to your engineers, you will end up supporting those projects which are really struggling and which your executives won’t even hear about until they end up on the news. Some of it will go to projects that you don’t use, things that your engineers find fascinating and want to use one day but don’t yet depend upon, but that’s fine too. Consider it an extremely cheap, efficient R&D expense.

A lot of the options for developers to support open source infrastructure are already tax-deductible, so if they contribute to something like one of the PSF’s fiscal sponsorees, it’s probably even more tax-advantaged than a regular business expense.

I also strongly suspect that if you’re one of the first employers to do this, you can get a round of really positive PR out of the tech press, and attract engineers, so, the race is on. I don’t really count as the “tech press” but nevertheless drop me a line to let me know if your company ends up doing this so I can shout you out.

Acknowledgments​

Thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you’ve read here and you’d like to read more of it, or you’d like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor! I am also available for consulting work if you think your organization could benefit from expertise on topics such as “How do I figure out which open source projects to give money to?”.

  1. I don’t have time to get into the margins for Starbucks and friends, their relationship with labor, economies of scale, etc. ↩
  2. While this is a theme that pervades much of his work, the only place I can easily find where he says it in so many words is on a podcast that sometimes also promotes right-wing weirdos and pseudo-scientific quacks spreading misinformation about autism and ADHD. So, I obviously don’t want to link to them; you’ll have to take my word for it. ↩
  3. and I will, since as I just recently wrote about, I need to make sure that people are at least aware of the option ↩
  4. Pending whatever legal approval program you have in place to vet the license. You do have a nice streamlined legal approvals process, right? You’re not just putting WTFPL software into production, are you? ↩
 
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So... the Adobe Photoshop model. Where it increases in price, loses more features per update and gets a ton of weird stuff added at the behest of the government. I'll stick to my Photoshop year 1999 (aka 7), thanks.
 
Somewhat optimistic of the author, but at least they got to the end of the article without mentioning AI.

Also they somehow managed to skip over the whole "let's import six million street shitters to replace the coders" element of the equation. Or maybe that's their point? "Let's import another six million Pajeets, but this time give them $50 in a month to outsource their labor to unemployed whites who we fired, then maybe our fucking airplanes won't fall out of the sky..."
 
Neat thing about software. 90% of the day to day productivity shit is near impossible to improve any further, yet microsoft and co. rake in billions on it yearly. Do you think there's much to improve in word or powerpoint? Why should you pay for a subscription instead of acquiring these software packages from a friendly eastern european country? It isn't like microsoft is paying an army of devs to keep improving this shit. While FAANG is sucking itself off furiously, the real industries that make real shit that runs the economy (industrial equipment, transportation, energy infrastructure, other non-software businesses, etc. ) struggle to compete with silicon valley wages for software and device engineers because real goods can't be made once and sold off millions of times. Everything from your oven to your automobile to your energy grid has code that some engineer wrote. Best hope they didn't hire some dirt cheap pajeet to program your oven. Be a real shame if it bugged out and caught on fire. I feel safer sleeping at night knowing that Boeing hires pajeets to program its jets.

New plan. Triple the taxes on any software company within the US that sells apps with microtransactions or subscriptions; quintuple the taxes on foreign companies. Bit by bit, the realm of software can be brought back into the real world. Death to netflix, death to candy crush!

Coffee shops are a ludicrously oversaturated market with next to no start up costs. No wonder the profit margins are nil for most shops. The free market has spoken. There are too many coffee shops. Time for consolidation, aggressive business tactics, or simply stop wasting time on a low profit market.
 
I've just spent two goddamned weeks struggling to get crumbly open-source shitware to compile because it was committed to the public "stable" with broken autoconf scripts and Makefile errors. If you think commercial software is expensive, you should try open-source.

Audit said:
It isn't like microsoft is paying an army of devs to keep improving this shit.
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There are hundreds of developers on the Office team.

Audit said:
While FAANG is sucking itself off furiously, the real industries that make real shit that runs the economy (industrial equipment, transportation, energy infrastructure, other non-software businesses, etc. ) struggle to compete with silicon valley wages for software and device engineers because real goods can't be made once and sold off millions of times.
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This is the real problem. Your software shouldn't be more expensive. Everything else should be. Software engineers for the FAANGs get paid 2x-5x what engineers in other industries make. Those other industries limp along without jacking up their prices because they're importing underpaid pajeets even more aggressively than tech is.
 
MS Office has been Microsoft's true Cash Cow for a long time. It's the one thing that companies are forced to pay for. Frankly I don't mind the Office 365 approach too much, because it comes with 1tb of onedrive. I guess there's some benefits to paying, like a more full Windows Defender and AI updates to Office apps.
 
Markass the Worst said:
, there are no shortage of horrific stories about labor exploitation and even slavery in the coffee supply chain.
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Coffee beans picked by african child slaves just taste better. also that else should they do? deal drugs in Paris?

The Ugly One said:
There are hundreds of developers on the Office team.
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yeah but what are they doing? I havent noticed any major change or improvement in 2 decades...



I think some of the ideas in this article are good. software companies should distribute small amounts of money to their devs to support open source programs they work with. they benefit in the long run if that software stay available and updated and its much cheaper to pay for some hosting space for some small but important project than to buy software from some cancer company like M$ or Oracle...
 
My long-since paid for copy of Office 2010 still does everything I need it to do, and I refuse to move to a subscription based software like MS has turned Office into.
 
That's a great idea! I agree. Now here's a 5000 word article on why my employer should just pay me more, too.

Just pay me more. It's so simple!
 
People still use MS Office?!

You are aware of OpenOffice and LibreOffice, right? At the very least, you know you can just pirate some older version of MS Office Suite. Right?

It’s like hearing somebody still uses Photoshop, instead of Gimp, in this day and age.
 
I initially cracked a joke about making the easiest to pirate product on the planet more expensive, but after actually reading it, this is just some FOSS janny bitter that he isn't getting the cred he thinks he deserves for maintaining whatever git he's parked himself on top of.

Also I may have avoided the trendiest of Silicon Valley-style tech outfits, but none of my employers were stupid enough to pay for IaaS as an open source project in Tidelift. It's weird he thinks its usage is so ubiquitous.
 
I'm happy to pay for software, as long as the software publisher is happy for me to grant me a license to use said software for life.

If Microsoft offered Windows 10 LTSC to private individuals tomorrow, even if they charged something like $300-$400 for a license, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Until then, I'll keep running pirated Windows like in the pre-Windows 7 days.
 
Markass the Worst said:
the only place I can easily find where he says it in so many words is on a podcast that sometimes also promotes right-wing weirdos and pseudo-scientific quacks spreading misinformation about autism and ADHD. So, I obviously don’t want to link to them; you’ll have to take my word for it.
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This fucking faggot :story:

Also, the author's name appears to be "Glyph Lefkowitz" (yes, seriously). The entire article is literally just a jew kvetching about how he should be paid more. You can't make this shit up.
 
WhiskeyJack said:
It’s like hearing somebody still uses Photoshop, instead of Gimp, in this day and age.
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>Using Linux in front of the class mates.
>Teacher says “Okay students, now open photoshop”.
>Start furiously away at terminal to install wine. Errors out the ass.
>Everyone else has already started their classwork.
>I start to sweat.
>Install GIMP. “Ummm… what the fuck is THAT anon?” a girl next to me asks.
>I tell her its GIMP and can do everything that photoshop does and ITS FREE!
>“Ok class, now use the shape tool to draw a circle!” The teacher says.
>I fucking break down and cry and run out of the class.
>I get beat up in the parking lot after school.
 
I've never worried about competition from pajeets. I've worked with them. They're retarded and an expensive management headache. I might lose some gig to a pajeets in the future, but that'll just be a reassurance that the job would've been a death march slog.

Get good at your craft, as long as there's a legitimate business value to what you do, you'll be in good shape long term.
 
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