💾 Archived View for beyondneolithic.life › posts › saas_rent.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:51:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I couldn't help but laugh to myself when engineers at my job complained in a meeting today that Docker is "rent seeking" and implied strongly that they're against this kind of behavior. It's funny because my job is with a software-as-a-service company whose entire business model is seeking rent. This fact didn't seem to occur to any of the folks doing the complaining, though.
Docker is changing their licensing, as I'm sure plenty of y'all know. This means that all Windows and macOS users will have to fork over money to use the official Docker Desktop implementations. So now my employer has to decide whether they're going to pay up or use some other FOSS solution.
To be clear, it's totally shitty that Docker is changing its licensing. My engineer friends aren't wrong to complain: they are indeed seeking rent. But so is *literally every SAAS company*, including the one we all work for. Rent is charging for access to something that the renter does not and will never own, in perpetuity. This is also the definition of SAAS, at least for-profit SAAS. You pay to use software that you will never own and which can only be accessed and modified under the terms stipulated in a contract mediated by money.
The rent/lease model seems to be the direction many software companies are going, and it's a damn shame, of course. But it's more or less par for the course. *The entire economy* is moving in this direction. This is "The Great Reset" that has caused so much hullabaloo in certain circles. "You will own nothing and you will be happy."
The irony was just too great for me to avoid writing a little about it, though. With a certain sort of bad logic, my engineer friends' total lack of awareness makes sense, and actually comes from a place of intuition: they get that rent is unjustifiable bullshit. But they can't take the next step of seeing that they're doing the same thing. There are plenty of reasons for this, but one of them is this: My company — and many companies — spend a great deal of time and effort trying to convince their workers that the company is "good" and is changing the world for the better. So the internal logic goes like this: Rent seeking is bad. But my company is good. Therefore, my company isn't seeking rent because my company isn't bad. It's just a whole mess of bad thinking, but it's the result of remarkably effective propaganda and marketing.
I'm afraid, but also rather certain, that this is how most people will continue to see things for quite some time, in uncomplicated and obfuscated moral terms grounded in the logic of marketing and branding. The company/software that I like is good, therefore I will consciously or unconsciously ignore the fact that in material economic terms, they're just like all the bad companies/software.
At least I get to laugh about it sometimes.