alt Hacker NewsI would rather software companies sell at more realistic prices so that they have a sustainable business, and signal to others in the industry that it's still possible to build a sustainable business.
No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
Pay for updates, and charge rightfully like you're supporting an engineer's salary, and that you have a commercial real estate lease to pay, and the compensation packages of full-time employees with benefits.
And boo people who say otherwise. No other professional field do I know of exists where cheap bastards abound while the entire industry is dependent on monopolies to pay the high wages of engineers.
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No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.
If surgeons could wiggle their fingers and make a better scalpel, at no cost, and give a copy to all their friends, also at no cost, I bet they'd have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.
Implying that one of the oldest still actively developed commercial text editors is not doing sustainable business practices kinda misses the mark. They’ve been at this since 1992, 34 years ago. I think they know their business.
Customer acquisition and retention is so very hard and expensive. It’s a tough equation.
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow paid updates short of releasing a whole separate app, and you can’t do upgrade discounts for current owners except via weird bundle discounts by sticking the new and old versions together as a package. So Apple is to blame for all the subscriptions.