Rent has no place at the foundational level of the internet. 😂
There are two class of products. Services and Goods.
A service is run by a middleman, that is, someone between you and something you want. If you don’t pay, they take it away. An example is Spotify. Boom. All your music gone.
A good is something you want, and once you pay for it, it’s completely yours, you can walk away. An example is an mp3. Listen any time you want. No one demands anything from you.
The objective of any landlord is to extract maximum rent, and provide minimum value.
Landlords optimize for making it hard to leave the relationship. AWS for example is amazing at this.
The incentives for someone who creates and sells goods is more likely to be aligned with a customer because they need to compete on cost-benefit.
@heapwolf software also blurs the lines due to post scarcity of distribution. If I buy a carpet from an artesan they n
lose it and now I have it.
Once code is written it can be created infinitely with zero extra cost. But the coder spent time on it. And they need more to make new and better versions possible. But then the cobsumer feels like its being gate kept and rent seeked. SaaS is the worst of it tho
@heapwolf Yeah kinda what I've been thinking lately. Like, photoshop used to be a lump sum you paid and it was way less shitty than the current subscription based thing.
@mauve I think it’s only gate keeping if the initial agreed-on value can be taken away. When software is a *good*, the original creator has no ability to take it away. New features, updates, and bug fixes could be provided under a new agreement but shouldn’t inhibit or reduce the initial agreed-on value.