Why 'free' proprietary software will always end in tears
Why 'free' proprietary software will always end in tears
Nearly every day, my kids come home from school and go on about some new app or game they and their mates are excited about.
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Couldn't be arsed to read this, fed the link into an LMM and asked to summarize. This is the result:
Dave Lane’s blog post, “Why ‘free’ proprietary software will always end in tears,” discusses the pitfalls of using proprietary software that is offered for free. He shares a personal story about a scouting group’s experience with a poorly implemented proprietary system and explains how such software often becomes a critical dependency for organizations. This dependency can lead to issues when the software’s limitations or costs become apparent. Lane argues that proprietary software, even when free, often leads to negative outcomes due to its restrictive nature and the control exerted by its developers
This is bad. Lane's argument is that freemium software is tore up from the floor up. You'd get the impression reading this summery that he was just bitching about one program his Boy Scout troop used.
And now they truly don't need to read it because you corrected it, in the end they won!
Maybe not everyone sees the world as win/lose, black/white, 1/0... weird concept, i know...
Ok then, "in the end they didn't learn anything"
summery
That's bright and sunny.
Which is why LLMs require a pretty hefty grain of salt.
LLM completely whiffed on this one:
- It’s not a poorly implemented app. It’s a well-implemented app that in the early stages is not monetized
- The issue is not that limitations and costs are becoming apparent. The issue is that after the honeymoon period ends, developers seeking return on investment start locking features critical for business behind a paywall, and charge a very high premium fee for services that used to be free.
- It’s not the restrictive nature of freemium software that becomes the issue. It’s the increasing enshittification of platforms to squeeze business customers for as much as they can before the platform collapses, betting on the established dependency making it too costly to switch to another platform.
IT’S A TRAP!
between the effort of doing this and then adding the comment, this was more effort than just reading the article yourself..
The most important point of venture capital isn't even mentioned.
Here's a 1-word explanation: enshittification. AKA The "loss leader" approach.