The problem is deeper than that. Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
You don't. The average person ought to do simple work and produce children, select few of which will have talent and integrity. These few have and always will make all the difference.
> Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.
I didn't mention the housing market? I was talking about anyone who produces goods (digital or physical).
There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something. They're different transactions that can benefit the different parties different ways in different situations. But if technological development lets the owner get the financial rewards of selling through "licensing" that's hardly a reduction in the owner's rights - and it's hard to make a "pro-strong-property-rights" argument that's based in "people should be forced to sell on the buyer's terms, not their own."
> There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something
I don't think there's anything inherently right about renting or owning.
Rather, it's one of the things we need to learn about and decide which is better for our societies.
Right now, we are far into testing the "renting" side, especially when it comes to housing and software, and it's very clear that, at least as currently implemented, this is creating an unhealthy society with massive wealth inequality.
I don't have an answer to this, but the only people I see arguing for the status quo are the very few who have benefited from it - landlords, politicians, company execs etc. Or at least people who aspire to join those classes.
If you do find yourself arguing for it, please ask yourself whether you're doing it for selfish reasons rather than looking beyond yourself.
I think the problem is not with renting but with letting owners hoard property (real estate or other) to profit from renting them out en masse, depriving others from ownership options. Also owners considering their property as something to do with as they want (exploit) rather than a duty of care. Best of both worlds for them: e.g. charge each month for software to pay for "ongoing development" and spend it on shareholders and/or features for growth but cut costs on support and maintenance... Or you know, rent out a moldy, drafty studio to a desperate intern who must move to Paris to work and doesn't have rich parents.
Maybe it proves your point that I'm technically a landlord now, but only to help out a neighbour so they could stay in the area for cheap, because they needed to downsize, approached me and we agreed on a very low price. I wasn't initially planning on renting it out because it needed some upfront work to be liveable, which might be even more selfish considering the housing shortage where i live...
>from the point of view of the producers of those things.
Fundamentally that's the question. Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Not trying to put words in OP's mouth, but I think the general idea is that software has allowed "the producers" to shrink in number and grow in power, turning independent farmers into serfs if you will. Should that cause us to reevaluate the previous question?
> Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Look at what the right wing US party always runs on - cutting taxes for "job creators", "running the government like a business", and bail outs for Wall Street.
At least half of this country fantasies about being at the beck and call of "the producers" of things. Fanboys of Elon Musk squeal if he interacts with them on Twitter.
Now there are tons of devices running Linux, for which you may be able to see the source code, but are unable to modify it, for ostensibly "security" reasons.
It's the producer of the software that has the property rights, not the user.
If I own a piece of land, I can charge people to visit it, but I don't give up my property rights to do so. We don't see that as an "erosion" of property rights but rather the opposite.
Not much software is really all that useful, let alone necessary, though. And only a little bit of that isn’t provided by one vendor or another as part of delivering whatever other actual service you were after (e.g. banking apps).
Property, that is, that didn’t exist prior to the wide use of software or SaaS platforms. Which begs the question, did the rights ever exist to be eroded in the first place?
> This was a huge barrier of entry for a lot of people who now have the ability to afford it and can make a living using it. Today photoshop is $9.99 per month
It wasn’t though. People learned photoshop on a pirated copy and used that to make art that Adobe didn’t care about. Companies are the ones who paid the $1000/seat license for their professional designers.
In your videogame example, there was no change in the concept of ownership between Nintendo 64 games and Playstation 5 games. If you have the physical media and the console, you can play the game.
Although Nintendo 64 tried to push the envelope in what consumers would pay, the price of video games on the mainstream consoles has stayed in the $50-$75 since at least 1985.
I don’t have a PS5 but my Xbox (my first one ever) is an absolute nightmare to play, even if I have the physical media. Still demands an internet connection. Still demands updates before I play. Typically I would expect to wait 2+ hours before I’m allowed to play a game I have on physical media. Often the estimated time is so long I just give up and don’t play. I let it update and then forget about it. Come back a week later and it says my system is out of date and needs an update before I play.
Most consoles and computers today don't even have a way to insert discs. You have to download the game which means you can't share or sell the game when you're done. That's why the price is lower. You license the software rather than own a copy. Also, $75 in 1985 is the equivalent of $224 today so even though the number has stayed the same the real cost is much lower now.
And how many games do people have to subscribe to PSN to use? How many people have to pay for internet to use their game? How many games have microtransactions or DLC? How about a season pass? How about all of the editions they have? What's the cost of a controller? Does a console come with one or two? How many times do you have to buy a game because backward compatibility doesn't exist?
I'm not a big gamer and I realize some (maybe most) of these are not required, but let's not act like the gaming industry is surviving off the base price of a game like in the 90s.
> I think the reality is most people are ok with not owning things.
> By removing ownership from the product offering the seller can reduce the price.
The price of ownership is greater than the price of licensing, as it comes with additional rights and privileges than licensing.
If a product or good is only offered and priced without ownership, how can you say that people "are ok with" not utilizing an option that's not provided to them? They cannot purchase ownership, by what means could they experience the difference?
The products you use as examples were wildly successful under an ownership paradigm, what says that Photoshop or N64 games would have been somehow better if they were licensed goods?
I agree "The price of ownership is greater than the price of licensing, as it comes with additional rights and privileges than licensing." That's why it was more expensive to purchase a product with ownership rights.
The reason I say people are ok with it is because the companies who didn't switch to a licensing model and kept their old prices either are no longer around or had to switch to a licensing model in order to stay competitive. If people were ok paying higher prices for the benefit of ownership then that's what we would see in the market today.
> I think the reality is most people are ok with not owning things. Otherwise, they wouldn't agree to licensing software from companies.
This is such a huge hand-waving blanket statement that I apologize in advance for my response.
The CAD shop I worked at was doing fine on R14 for YEARS and specialized apps/etc with hardware dongles until everyone got onto the 'SaaS' or 'Subscription' mode. And frankly, the "choice" our shop had more than once was 'our customer signed a deal to use this so we have to buy it'. What was worse was they did that twice in one year, and the second product cost as much per seat/year as the first product cost FOR OUR WHOLE TEAM per year.
> Another example is video games. The average Nintendo 64 game used to be $75.99 in 1997 which is $150 in today's dollars. Today the average PS5 game price is $70. That's half the price.
You're comparing apples to oranges there. Heck, even back then, a -huge- benefit of the PS and Saturn was that production costs for discs were -cheap-. Something like 3$ including case and sleeve. Compare to N64 carts which as far as I can understand would cost somewhere between 15-30$ depending on size of ROM. Neither of those factor in actual 'distribution' costs (i.e. shipping to retailer) but I know which format was lighter/smaller... Also PS1 'greatest hits' were the closest we had to steam sales at the time.
> By removing ownership from the product offering the seller can reduce the price.
Says every SaaS that gives a nice intro contract that will even give a nice first contract, knowing that by renewal the buyer will be more at their mercy with too much pain involved to 'get away' from ever-increasing prices... Low-Code tools are really good at this strategy lol.
The CPI was already built into the discussion (the original discussion was inflation--CPI adjusted--prices, and this branch was about a comment that indicated that wages had not kept price with inflation) and the housing price thing just indicates that buying a house has gotten more expensive even adjusting for inflation, which is true but way afield of the discussion of game prices.
few companies actually offer products that you can just pay for. Its pretty rare and usually extremely celebrated when it happens. When it comes to things like housing and cars, very few people can buy a home and have to rent or take out gigantic loans. I wouldn't read this as "people are okay with not owning things" so much as "what choice is there?" and thats at the root of the problem. Monopolies and collusion have destroyed choice and competition which is supposedly the root of capitalism and neo-liberalism.
