this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 87 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Vote with your wallet. Boycott rent seeking companies that lock away their IP and charge money for access to it.

For example, FOR ADOBE TO DESERVE MY MONEY EVERY MONTH, 100% OF THEIR TECHNOLOGIES SHOULD BE OPEN SOURCE.

The only rent I happily pay for is a good VPN.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

jokes on them, i still use CS6.

wankers.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Yea. Still use my full suite $200 adobe from being student. Like what, a decade old at this point?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I pay for music streaming on Tidal. I have a pretty big library of music from attempts to get away from streaming (and keep it up on Soulseek), but I use curated playlists too much to get away from streaming

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I definitely don't recommend that you look up Tidal downloaders that allow users to keep the music they want from the service. You definitely don't want to build a whole digital library that way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Boycott rent seeking companies

That's all of capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

yes it is.....

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (7 children)

God forbid a programmer be compensated for their labor.

I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what's wrong with lifetime purchases?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

As a programmer, and an open source one paid handsomely, fuck subscriptions and asshole software companies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

How do you get paid handsomely for open source? What's your funding model?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

The customers (multinational and middle size companies, ranging from telecoms, banks, governments, goods and services) pay for support and features of the software. Software has always bugs and CVEs that need fixing, or new features, or needs for securing its supply chain (with SLSA, SBOMs, etc).

There's a handful multibillionarie companies that follow this approach with open source: Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, VMware, etc. Particularly in cloud-native tech like Kubernetes and all that gets deployed on top of it.

If a technology is not open source it really doesn't exist anymore. Customers have learned from the last 30 years and run away from vendor lock-in (AWS, AKS, Google cloud services..).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh, I program with open source stacks too. I thought you were referring to a specific FOSS app or SaaS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Well, my employer pays me to maintain 100% of the time a specific security project that is deployed on Kubernetes. The project is donated to the CNCF (part to the Linux foundation), and my employer doesn't push any of us in the team to work on any specifics, just to keep improving it in general. All development happens in the open, including slack chats, etc. (Would be happy to share the specific project, written in Rust mainly, but I don't want to doxx this specific Lemmy account :D)

[–] JasonDJ 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

According to Wikipedia, he's actually a criminal defense attorney in California, and also "The Fish", original lead guitarist for Country Joe and the Fish.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Mmh, and if I go by your nickname, you are Jason Kaye, influential hardcore DJ and dead since a year.

[–] JasonDJ 3 points 3 weeks ago

I also appear on any graph that shows the months between July and January abbreviated by the first letter of the month.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago

I’m actually a programmer. There are ways to compensate us that doesn’t force people to pay rent for our work.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You buy a pair of shoes, the maker is paid. Why do you have to pay the bastard every month?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Samuel Vimes nodding

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?

This thread is about subscriptions. So I'd assume that when people talk about 'rent seeking companies' etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Adobe still has lifetime purchases?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I am a programmer, and I get paid whether or not the product is bought. Shovel your dogshit somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

That's a pretty short term view though, no? Presumably if an expected revenue stream does not generate flow to supplant the initial capital outlay, said business will not be a going concern for long?

I'm not defending subscription models at all, they're corrosive to the economy, but your comment had me curious.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I am a tech consumer and enthusiast first. I am a corporate shill sellout second. I wish for bad practices in the tech community to die, even if it's my own company doing it.

My concern as an engineer is that the product gets made well. I have no say or control over how the business cretins and marketing scumbags decide to destroy the company through terrible unethical practices like charging SaaS for completely self-contained software.

The short term view is that you need to keep a company afloat. Businesses should fail if they deliver products in awful ways. Yes, if the company fails, I will lose my job, and that is okay. It would be through no fault of my own, or really even the customers who wouldn't pay for my company's product. It would be the fault of the business decisions that were made. And the product landscape would then open up after my company's failure. For example, if Adobe would finally fucking die then we may actually see better products on the PDF, and photo/video editing market. No more monopoly on sub-par creative cloud products.

The more realistic long term view is that software engineers will be okay if their company fails. The overwhelming majority are smart, get paid extremely well, and exist in a field that needs their manpower. They will be able to find a new job much easier than other fields. The tech community will not be okay long-term if bad companies cannot fail.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Completely understand your viewpoint. I'm also aware though that there is a heavy saturation right now (at least in the DMV, which has historically been a bellwether for the greater economy) of both IT and bioscience/biotech industries. Both fields that also require very smart, educated, and experienced workers. So, I'm saying that things can shift quickly, and workers are always on the losing end, so it pays to note how the winds are blowing, regardless of current status.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

This doesn’t really make sense. Programmers are usually just paid a salary. My salary is the same regardless of how many subscribers there are. I don’t give a shit. If everyone started pirating everything it wouldn’t really impact my job. There’s plenty of dev work to do.