To take my own field as an example, as one author remarked, “software is a service industry under the persistent delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.” In truth, most software has always been paid for by people who had reason other than projected sale of licenses to want it to exist, but this was obscured for a couple of decades by shrinkwrap software, shipped on floppy disks or CDs, being the only part of the industry visible to the typical nonspecialist. But the age of shrinkwrap software is passing—outside entertainment, how often does the typical customer buy a program these days? - yet the industry is doing fine. We just don’t need copyright law the way we thought we did.
Well, a lot of “service” software that you interact with is running on someone else’s computer. You could rip off the HTML and CSS of a search engine or a web store and not have anything particularly useful without the backend.
Software industry has been a service industry for much longer...
There are support contracts, there is customization, there is custom development.
Look at RedHat: it is a billion-dollar company selling boxed software which would take nearly no damage if copyright and trade secret laws were brought down. After all, it manages to compete with CentOS. Of course, larger near-monopolies would take a larger hit, but smaller players would gain and the amount of employed programmers would not change dramatically.
As for webservice software… Well, the pendulum is always in motion. A large data breach of suitable nature can swing it back.
Such as?
To take my own field as an example, as one author remarked, “software is a service industry under the persistent delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.” In truth, most software has always been paid for by people who had reason other than projected sale of licenses to want it to exist, but this was obscured for a couple of decades by shrinkwrap software, shipped on floppy disks or CDs, being the only part of the industry visible to the typical nonspecialist. But the age of shrinkwrap software is passing—outside entertainment, how often does the typical customer buy a program these days? - yet the industry is doing fine. We just don’t need copyright law the way we thought we did.
Well, a lot of “service” software that you interact with is running on someone else’s computer. You could rip off the HTML and CSS of a search engine or a web store and not have anything particularly useful without the backend.
Software industry has been a service industry for much longer...
There are support contracts, there is customization, there is custom development.
Look at RedHat: it is a billion-dollar company selling boxed software which would take nearly no damage if copyright and trade secret laws were brought down. After all, it manages to compete with CentOS. Of course, larger near-monopolies would take a larger hit, but smaller players would gain and the amount of employed programmers would not change dramatically.
As for webservice software… Well, the pendulum is always in motion. A large data breach of suitable nature can swing it back.