Microsoft's revenue in 1990 was 1.18B when they launched Office, sold for one-time payments. Of course they're pushing people to subscribe now so they can get that sweet recurring revenue, but that business model sustained freaking Microsoft for about 30 years.
I'm not convinced by unsustainability arguments. Now, it could be that competing with FOSS makes it a lot harder to make money now. I'm sympathetic to that, inasmuch as I can be for someone who wants to sell what others are giving away. That would be challenging. But why is it suddenly impossible to sell software, when they was the common model until rental became popular a few years ago? What's inherently different now that let someone sell programs for decades but now it's just impossible?
buying - capital expenditure with amortization (and usually goes through a lot of approvals, centralized IT, etc.), subscription - expense, frequently decided upon and paid directly by the Line-Of-Business/dept. Expense is generally better, so it is chosen by business when possible (it is all very generic of course, and there are niche cases where situation is different)
That matches on the supplying side as subscription revenue is also generally better.
Fairly certain it'd be more sustainable than a $4/month subscription, which is a nuisance for anybody who'd actually want to pay for this.
$4 is targeting the hobbyist market. Within that segment, the tiny population of devs who'd actually be willing to pay for tools usually uses a large assortment of tools, and is not willing to pay a separate subscription fee for each.
5,000 seats x $200 price = $1,000,000 cash realized, right now, no debt financing needed for funding development, regardless if said dev shop leaves you.
5,000 seats x $4 = $20,000 month. That kinda pays the salary of a single FTE, and development ceases if customer runs away, only safe option would be to finance further development to insulate yourself from churn.
With that, he could invest it, finish the features, start work on 2.0 and charge and upgrade of $20 to all his customers when he has MSSQL, MySQL, pgsql, SQLite, Oracle. 2.0 could include cloud db’s.
Not everything has to be a subscription and if people continue to find value, they’ll upgrade if they think it worthy.
Subscriptions tend to be vampires on the wallet and are used to trap users into paying a developer indefinitely. I consider it hostile to users. The exception is if it’s a service that can’t run on my machine. Or a service that does back office for me.
There are also things like Dolphin actions/addons (I forget what they’re actually called) that you can add so you can do a conversion with a right click.
They basically consume the libheif command line tool so you install that as a prerequisite.
How did you get this to work? (See the config and did this before but never got ly to work on nixos, i migth have just been to early i guess)
Ive been using LY on arch for a while, and it is great looking, when it works, but it has lots of issues.
Mostly related to multi monitor, kernel warnings filling up the screen, and for all being just sligthly broken. But then again probably user error.
In fairness to Emacs, this is a bit sour grapes on my part!
I have tried to go fully into the "Emacs mindset" (org-mode for everything, multiple pages of custom hydra keybinds etc.) a number of times and I always bounce off. I always feel there is some activation threshold that if I could cross it, I could enter editor nirvana.
I used to joke that the way I use Emacs is I open it, give the empty buffer a very meaningful look, C-x C-c, and open VS Code.
For whatever it's worth, I think in 2025 with good LLMs, Emacs is actually bliss. Even as a true believer, I would regularly think of customisations, and then sigh at the effort and not bother. Now, I just get an AI to help me write the Emacs Lisp which not only teaches me new things, but also gives me (in seconds) an upgrade to my productivity which will last forever. Not only that, but I am using LLMs in my editor to help write code to make using LLMs in my editor even easier, so I feel like I've simultaneously crossed two thresholds.
My story is a lot like yours, except swap the two editors. I decide I'm really gonna try Visual Studio Code this time. Everybody uses it, it's become the default editor for like every recent programming language... it must be better than what I'm using, right? Fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong!
And then I fire it up and... it's not compatible with my muscle memory. Plus I can't just pop open a buffer and morph my editor into what I need for the task in a language I like. (There is considerable rigamarole involved in writing a Visual Studio Code extension; I tried.) I can't work with buffers the way I'm used to, it doesn't indent the way I'm used to... and unless I'm willing to limit myself with VSCodium, it's spying on me in a way I consider hostile. So I put it away and get what I need done in Emacs. I must've been through this cycle like, six times.
> The author's call is that we acknowledge this subjective side.
I think that acknowledging the subjective side is a necessary step to making more rational choices. If you don't know your motivations, you will be a motivated reasoner.
When you can add "I like this tech because it helps me build an identity I aspire to" as an item in the pros column, you realize you no longer have to.
> When you can add "I like this tech because it helps me build an identity I aspire to" as an item in the pros column, you realize you no longer have to.
But, for many of the cases of using-obscure-thing-instead-of-popular-thing, that's not a factor.
Not everything divergent is hipster impulse. Nor is everything about slotting yourself into a clique category in high school.
Which is why I asked for clarification on what was being said.
FWIW, I use a vintage ThinkPad mainly because I can type all day on it without problem. The serviceability is also nice. I also own a sleek high-end last-year's P1 and an X1, both of which I think would look more attractive in cafes and in some ways fit my ideal self-image better than the T520 that I choose to use instead. Currently, due to the inferior keyboards, I might use the P1 or X1 only if I need to do a startup meeting with a 20-something who doesn't already know I'm good despite being over-30. That choice would be the image one, and it's not about validation or aspirational identity, but pragmatic gaining of acceptance despite prejudice.
The title of the post here ("Choose tools that make you happy") is wrong.
I wrote "You can choose tools that make you happy" to mean "you have permission to use tech just because it makes you happy or triggers your curiosity", so that people don't waste their time coming up with false technical reasons why their technology choices are rational. It is not a command that you should choose tools entirely or mainly for affective reasons.
I'm describing the set of posts that jointly satisfy:
- The thesis is "tool X is superior to (Y, Z, ...)" or "X is a modern/practical choice".
- The argument is purported to be technical and rational.
- The arguments are fallacious and do not stand to rational scrutiny.
Where you can reasonably think that the author's actual reasons are affective, and they are trying to make rational arguments by backward-chaining from the conclusion and failing.
If an article is (jointly) written in green font, uses the word "the", and is fallacious and does not stand to rational scrutiny; that article is fallacious and does not stand to rational scrutiny.
reply