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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Python (was Re: I did not inhale)
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2024 15:09:10 +0200
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On 20/08/2024 10:27, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On 2024-08-20 09:44, David Brown wrote:
> 
>> That's an easy claim to make - saying something that sounds obvious 
>> and calling it a "fact".  But that does not make it true in general.
> 
> But sometimes it does.

You are snipping a bit too much context - as it stands, it looks like 
some things are true simply because they are easy to say, which is of 
course nonsense.

I think your line of reasoning was too simplistic to be realistic.  It 
is simply not the case that you have to have price reflecting cost to 
make a market, or that you have to have a market to have competition, or 
that you have to have competition to have quality.  None of these is 
true in general (even taking into account that the term "market" could 
be defined in many ways).  Each of them is true in some cases, but even 
that does not mean they follow as logical consequences.

> 
>> There are endless numbers of situations where price and cost are 
>> highly out of sync.  And there are endless different ways in which 
>> price and cost can be measured for different things.
> 
> Yes
> 
>> Software development, licensing and sale is /totally/ different.  The 
>> cost models are completely different.  Base cost is high, but unit 
>> cost is near zero.
> 
> Yes, and that is the problem. Not really a unique problem, e.g. books, 
> music records etc.
> 

Those are different situations again, but certainly closer than the 
production of "wotsits".  Traditionally, books and records have relevant 
unit costs as well as base "development" costs, and then much of their 
later income comes from sources invisible to end users (like film rights 
or royalties).

I don't think any of this is a "problem", it is simply that you can't 
wildly mix simplified (or invented) "economic facts" in totally 
different situations.

>>> One could argue that there cannot be software market at all for 
>>> costs-intensive stuff like OS and compilers similarly to the communal 
>>> infrastructure like roads etc. That might be but it is another question.
>>
>> That might be a slightly less bad model than the traditional 
>> cost/price market model, but it's not good either.
> 
> ... counting the potholes ...
> 
>> Software is in a very different category from "real" things - and 
>> indeed there are many different categories of software with very 
>> different economic models.  Any attempt to compare it to traditional 
>> economic market theory is doomed to be of little relevance.
> 
> Maybe, but then we have what we have.

It often surprises me that economic theories give any usable results at 
all.  Most are based on total gibberish with no relation to real life, 
such as linear towns, totally rational customers, and such 
simplifications that they are close to meaningless.  They basically work 
by the central limit theorem - with enough variables, results are fairly 
near an average for much of the time.

> 
>> The success or failure of software companies or products is mostly a 
>> combination of skill, hard work, diplomacy, ruthlessness and luck - 
>> with luck being perhaps the biggest part.
> 
> The question is sustainability in long term.
> 

Then luck is even more the biggest part.  Predictions are hard, 
especially about the future.