I Think Your App Should Be Free - <AUTHOR> http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/i-think-your-app-should-be-free/ <comment><USER3> This is nothing more than a thinly-disguised allegory about piracy in the music industry. There are several big differences between the music and the software industry which I won't go into, except to say that: even taking this story at face value, for the developers to then start suing everyone downloading the fake copies of the app would still be a huge dick move.

<comment><USER4> Further, what is the message of the allegory supposed to be?

The analogy between music and tech suggests that the two hits-based industries selling digital goods are not so different after all. But why would our morality in one case be so different from the other case?

If anything, this allegory seems to suggest to me that the recording industry has committed one of the biggest public relations bungles of our lifetimes. People who wouldn't think to pirate a mobile app would pirate music without a second thought thanks to widespread lawsuits, pay-for-play, price fixing, and of course, ease.

<comment><USER5> _what is the message of the allegory supposed to be?_

It sounded to me like the message was supposed to be "it doesn't sound so awesome when you see it from the other side of the looking glass, now does it". (It felt like it was targeted at people who can identify with developing mobile apps)

<comment><USER6> The author said in the comments:

"The point of the article is that making that choice for someone else is wrong."

It's my feeling that in this article at least, the author does not really care about the rights and wrong of copying, piracy, intellectual property, etc. He is scared by relatively few people on the internet being both lawmaker, judge, party and executioner when it comes to the monetization of a digital product, and the reason why he is scared is that these few people are not even potential customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I'm scared that we live in a world where people think they're entitled to anything they can take without consequence. The fact that they aren't taking the original means nothing. They have broken a social contract with the creator of content that, ironically, they really enjoy and would like to see more of in the future.

The problem of someone taking copyrighted content and making it available for others is a small one. The big problem is the many millions of people who take advantage of it. If everyone recognized that they're not entitled to anything except their basic human rights, none of which have anything to do with access to MP3s, then others posting that content online wouldn't matter.

The hope with this article was a little empathy from a community that often leans toward not caring about copyright law as it pertains to music. While many chose to go the route of poking tiny holes in parts of the analogy, plenty didn't realize it was an allegory and talked about how messed up it was. Many of them the same people who fight music copyright tooth and nail.

It's just sad to think that everybody enjoys music, just like they enjoy software, and so many other things that can be easily taken, and yet don't care if the people who create it see enough benefit to keep making it for them. It's short sighted and will result in fewer people having the time to become experts in these crafts, which is a loss for everyone. Sure, quantity is at an all time high, but in art that hardly matters.

<comment><USER7> > _The problem of someone taking copyrighted content and making it available > for others is a small one. The big problem is the many millions of people > who take advantage of it._

Precisely. Many millions of people take advantage of it, and the overall good is greater than if they didn't. If the cost of distributing some good falls down to zero, you can't make a living by distributing these. Find another way; for instance provide a web service through your app, that unregistered copies can't access.

> _It's just sad to think that everybody enjoys music, just like they enjoy > software, and so many other things that can be easily taken, and yet don't > care if the people who create it see enough benefit to keep making it for > them._

For the tremendous majority of professional musicians recorded music never represented a significant source of revenue at all, if ever. Most musicians get paid for playing, and nothing else. That people swap mp3 around have absolutely no influence on their life -- except when it helps them getting known.

<comment><AUTHOR> The overall good? The overall good of what? Your right to listen to music for free? That's not good overall for the artists who created that music. Why should they have to make 2nd and 3rd products that you "approve of" in order to be compensated?

People already use lack of easy access as their excuse for piracy. Now you want them to make some hard to crack app just for people to be able to listen to it? How about people just stop taking what's not theirs and treat artists with respect?

And in regard to your last statement, it's not your right to determine whether exposure alone should be the reward of their hard work.

<comment><USER7> > _The overall good? The overall good of what?_

If you swallow a cost of 10, but that 11 people gets 1 from your contribution, the society as a whole wins.

> _How about people just stop taking what's not theirs and treat artists with > respect?_

When something that used to be hard becomes totally simple, obvious and costless, there is absolutely no sense trying to stick to the previous state of the matter. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, what used to be a complex, tough and expensive endeavour (copying books by hand) instantly became worthless. Too bad, but the net gain for the society as a whole was immense.

Similarly, the net gain we could enjoy from being able to copy, transfer, duplicate, mix, rehash, transform existing digital goods is world-changing. Some will lose at some point, but they'll have to get over it. Nowadays large parts of the copyright laws are only manacles impending progress, defending soon to be dead practices and business models.

> _And in regard to your last statement, it's not your right to determine > whether exposure alone should be the reward of their hard work._

Did you read me? As a musician composer and arranger, I've earned a living by teaching and live performance, but a net loss on recordings; and it was back in the 90s, when CD-R was unheard of.

The hard true fact : only artists aired on radio and TV make money on recorded music. They are a minuscule minority of musicians. Same goes for actors, painters, etc.

<comment><USER5> _If you swallow a cost of 10, but that 11 people gets 1 from your contribution, the society as a whole wins._

It sounds to me like you're saying "so long as society sees a net gain, it's ok to exploit other people"

<comment><USER7> Yes, that's the justification for taxes, for instance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everybody pays taxes that are invested in products and services for all to share, not one person.

<comment><USER8> A large proportion of taxes are for the purpose of wealth redistribution. We do it because giving $900 to a poor person (arguably) results in more of a benefit than the harm caused by taxing a rich person $1000 and spending $100 in overhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the tone, it seems that this is sarcasm and the author's point is against music piracy. Despite the seething tone of a few sentences, the points he make sarcastically are actually decent points. From sentence to sentence, I go from being convinced that he's trying to be against music piracy to being convinced of the opposite. When he says

> _They tell you your business model is broken. You should make money some > other way. Maybe you should sell t-shirts with your company's name on them, > or put on events of some kind and charge for tickets. That's where the real > money is. Paid apps are a thing of the past, they say._

I can't help but think, Yeah, I actually do think that. Like it or not, distribution of quality media was a big part of the value provided by the music industry before the digital age and the internet. I'm not making an argument for or against the ethics of the piracy itself, but I think music producers (both big studios and "little guys") are unwise to rely on legislation and lawsuits to protect their business.

</comment><comment><USER10> The only argument for getting paid in this article is that sweat deserves a return.

That was Marx's labor theory of value. Marx was wrong.

You deserve a return only when you _efficiently meet someone else's needs._ The secret to economic success is not sweat, but creative sloth.

We measure value against the cost of substitutes, and other people already entertain me for free (without piracy).

Maybe entertainment just isn't a hard problem. Maybe the bottom 99% of entertainers are basically tagging cat pictures. Maybe we shouldn't encourage them.

I guess if you're an app dev, and want to learn one thing from the music industry, I'd find a way to connect with fans and give them a reason to buy: <http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/12695>

Then look for ways to be creatively lazy, and make sure your app can't be replaced by going for a walk on a spring day.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really don't care if teenagers with no money run a free copy of my stuff. They weren't going to buy it anyway - and now they're out there increasing its penetration. From a business perspective, it's often a win if you stop fallaciously calculating every illegitimate copy as a loss of the sticker price. From a strictly personal standpoint, I take it as a compliment that they like it enough to go to the trouble.

<comment><USER12> "it's often a win if you stop fallaciously calculating every illegitimate copy as a loss of the sticker price."

This _really_ depends on how you define loss.

In a standard legitimate sale of a product, there is a bidirectional exchange of value -- the customer submits currency whose total value is equivalent to the value requested for the product being purchased. Simultaneously, for submitting the currency of that value, the customer receives a product of that value. (We'll assume the price is totally fair and equivalent to value at this point, but even if it's not the price presumably still includes the true value of the product, if not more)

In an illegitimate transaction -- literal theft, in this case -- the criminal customer forcibly receives the product, exchanging nothing of value in return to the merchant or the producer of the product. In this case, there is no question of loss; the customer has received something with inherent value and given no value.

In the illegitimate transaction of piracy, the end result is the same as theft with the sole exception that the original product has not been "lost" in the traditional sense of the word -- however, the criminal customer has still received a product of value and exchanged nothing at all, much less the value of the product.

Now, regardless of which of these three transactions has taken place for your product, I am presuming that your product had a significant cost to develop -- unless, of course, all of your tools were free, you had no expenses at all and you regard your time as totally worthless, in which case all income from the product is profit. I submit to you, then, that if your costs in developing your product surpass the value you received for it, yet the value you received for it is, itself, surpassed by the value of the product "in the wild" -- e.g. you have sold $450 worth of software, yet there are $750 worth of copies of it total being enjoyed by people (purchased & pirated combined) (100% arbitrary numbers), and the cost to develop the product was around $1500 -- then you have certainly incurred a loss on the sole basis that you have not received enough value to cover your costs.

The standard rebuttal to this is the tried-and-true "but they would not have purchased my product anyway." Perhaps this is true -- however, I would consider this irrelevant. Under normal, legitimate economic circumstances, the purchase of a product is the only way to attain it; therefore, if they would not have purchased the product anyway, _they wouldn't have the product_. In this case, they have not purchased the product, but they do have it and enjoy its use, and you have received no value in return for it despite having put value into it.

However, assuming the value received for the product exceeds the costs of producing it, but the value of the product "in the wild" as mentioned above still exceeds the value received... perhaps "loss" is less correct in this instance, but you are still lacking the total value that under normal circumstances you should have received. What would you call that?

In any case, I am not sure how it is fallacious to call a product of value obtained illegitimately (one way or another) for free a loss to the product's producer.

<comment><USER13> Most people define loss as the difference in assumed outcomes between scenario #1 and the illegal scenario #2 - a business has never been entitled to the full value of a person's enjoyment of a product. That's why most people scoff at the amounts cited by the record labels.

<comment><USER14> "a business has never been entitled to the full value of a person's enjoyment of a product"

..and a user has never been entitled to the full enjoyment of a business's product. But it doesn't seem to stop articles like this from being written or large amounts of users to just steal it anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is the moral of this story? "I'm an App Developer, therefore I shouldn't pirate music"?

Ultimately, piracy breaks down to "people want your stuff, but you've priced it too highly". In the case of apps, that's all it is. In the case of music, it's a little different. Music is cheap, but it's rare that you can get it in a good format: everything is lossy, and for people with good audio kit and good hearing, that makes the music unusable. Therefore, people that both Want It Now and want full quality are going to download the FLAC torrent rather than buy lossy MP3s. (They won't buy the CD because it takes too long for the mailman to deliver it.)

The same goes for movies and TV. Nobody will sell you those things without DRM, so if you use Linux exclusively, you have no option but to pirate the content. Make every TV show a standard non-DRM'd HTTP download for a buck, and piracy (among people with money) evaporates instantly. But the content producers want a bogeyman to blame for all their problems, so they intentionally keep piracy alive.

(If there were no such thing as the ability to pirate movies, people still wouldn't have bought the 88th redo of Star Wars. We liked it the first time. But it's easier for Lucas to blame the evil greedy pirates than his evil greedy self.)

<comment><USER16> I would be willing to be 100 downloads of my app that price isn't really the issue on music piracy. If you charged $0.10 per song, it wouldn't result in a massive sales increase. The barrier to paid downloads is that people have to use a credit/debit card, usually register somehow and other things that form a barrier to entry. I think $0.99 isn't much to pay for a song or an app, but there are people (a fairly sizable number) who just want to download without going through the presumed hassle of the payment process. I bet if you were giving away CDs outside of the mall and charged $0.25, people wouldn't think twice about tossing a quarter into the can. Take that same song and put it online and the same people happy to toss you the quarter would rather steal the song than process a payment of 25 cents.

The problem isn't price -- it's the barrier of payment.

<comment><USER17> Now that is probably the most sensible thing that's been written in this entire thread.

Figure out a way to make the transaction as seamless & low-risk as "tossing a quarter into the can" and you've gone a long way to solving the piracy problem.

How you do this, I have no idea. I would look at iTunes & Steam as examples of services that have been successful at smoothing the friction & establishing trust. People spook easily when asked for CC info…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you look at the history of smartphone development, you'll find a better analogy.

You see, back in the '00s, it used to be common knowledge that "nobody pays for third-party smartphone apps". It was scientifically proved over and over again, on platforms like Symbian and Palm, by research after research. You see, back then getting hold of a mobile app was relatively hard; you had to go hunting for it online, find it in some sort of online directory, pay _tens or hundreds_ to the directory (which was also trying to sell you some other crap like proprietary downloaders etc or spamming you or generally treating you -- and developers! --- like shit). The market was tiny and tech-savvy, and resented having to pay so much for small add-ons, often of dubious quality.

Then came the Apple AppStore, and lo, all of a sudden people were _paying_ for apps! Why? Because the ease of purchase and lower prices dramatically enlarged the market to people who simply couldn't be bothered to jailbreak and pirate just to save a few quid, or wanted to support authors. The pirate market didn't disappear, but mobile developers flourished nonetheless.

Now replace apps for music, and good streaming services for the AppStore, and I think you can see where things are going: consumers wants a _simple_ and _immediate_ buying experience where they don't _feel_ like they're being ripped off by third parties (even though he still is, by Apple) and with _low_ prices. Give them that, and they're quite happy to pay; try to force them into digital slavery, and they'll resort to the black market.

Now, guess what the music industry tried to do for the last 15 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Digital Slavery"? We're talking about owning, or not owning an MP3. Going without it is hardly slavery.

It is really very simple. If someone feels the price an artists asks for their songs is too much, or feels that obtaining a copy legally is too much "work", then they don't need to have a copy. They're not entitled to it for any reason whatsoever.

<comment><USER18> Look around you. Entertainment cartels are pushing draconian legislation across the world, making copyright infringement a criminal felony, with harsher penalties than manslaughter; they are threatening to disconnect people from the internet, which in many cases would compromise their livelihood; they are pushing DRM into software and hardware, so that you don't own your device, they do; they support Chinese-style firewalls to blacklist "pirate" websites. All this regardless of whether I actually want to buy their crappy products.

If that's not digital slavery...

<comment><AUTHOR> They don't care if you want to buy their products. They simply care that, if you do not, you do not also take those products without paying for them. If people were not taking for free things that cost significant money to produce, and did not keep ignoring the light-handed laws that already exist, there would be no need for more draconian measures. But most importantly, what does any of this have to do with whether or not you are entitled to a free copy of the new Bieber album? Don't take things that don't belong to you, and you don't need to worry about having your internet taken away. It's pretty much the same as drunk driving and everything else.

<comment><USER18> I don't "take" anything from anyone; I copy my Bieber, and you still have it. People who care about Bieber are still supporting him financially; people who don't, they wouldn't have bothered anyway. Since production and distribution costs have basically disappeared, supply is now virtually unlimited; economic theory tells us that the market price is now zero. Harsh reality, but that's the truth. Any law implemented to alter this state of things is simply trying to make the water flow upwards.

(besides, you cannot "steal" digital content, it's just a bunch of bits; I flip mine to look like yours, and I have a copy. Which is why SaaS is so popular, of course: what is sold is now the actual service, rather than a bunch of bits.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Economic theory ought to have taught you that there is more to bringing a product to market than how much is costs to duplicate that product after it's been invented.

The scarcity of good music is real, and it's not found in its distribution model. You're neglecting to acknowledge the complexity of the process that goes into the creation of that product in the first place. Sure, you can duplicate an MP3 with next to no cost. But duplicating a digital file that nobody enjoys is not the point. We're talking about duplicating something that hundreds of thousands or millions of people want.

To even have that file to duplicate, we have to go back to the 5 year old kid who first picked up the guitar. Let's account for the thousands of hours they practiced their craft until they were good enough to even begin to be capable of making something people will enjoy. The number of people who will enjoy a recording of just one guitar playing is very few, so they work with group after group of other musicians, failing to create a product that a lot of people like.

One day, at around 25 years old, this person stumbles into a room with 3 other people who have spent thousands of hours practicing their own instruments, and, for the first time ever, they start creating music that will have mass appeal. They spend months writing music together. Sometimes those people don't get along, but they fight through it because the product they're making is that difficult to create with other people. After months writing, and more months practicing, they finally have the blueprints for a product that people will enjoy and want their own copy of. But it's just in their heads.

Now, these people either invest their own money, or they go through painstaking lengths to attract an investor by way of a record label. That record label, in exchange for an investment in them and for lending them connections and years of expertise, takes a significant percentage of the returns from their sales. Or, they go it alone, keeping the lion's share of their sales, but having to invest all of their own money and their own time managing the business side of what they bring to market.

After weeks or months in the studio, working with a producer, several professionally trained production engineers, a mixing engineer, a mastering engineer, and other highly specialized experts in their field, they finally have a high quality recording.

Now, they take that recording, the sum total of 4 peoples' years of practice, their creativity, talent, dedication and hard work, and they make a CD of it. They pay for duplication of CDs and make digital downloads available online. All the while this was happening, they were building up fans by touring, engaing in social marketing, fliering clubs, and doing anything else they can think of or get their friends to help with to spread the word about their upcoming album. When the album is ready, they hit the road, touring endlessly, stuck in a van with people who they may or may not even like that much, living on pennies as they try to make people aware of their music.

This, my friend, is the "assembly line". It is not the duplication that happens in the computer. The product is assembled over 15-20 years of intense work, combined with a dozen strokes of luck culminating in the right people meeting, creating that product, and getting the necessary financing to roll it out to the public.

Now, you think it's not worth $0.99 because it doesn't cost anything to make extra copies? Even if that were remotely true, if you want this magical process to happen again, you might want to make sure these people can eat.

<comment><USER18> And how exactly is this different from any other trade out there?

Plumbers are not born as such, they invest money and time to become skilled professionals; but when they fix your boiler, they don't ask for royalties every time you turn the boiler on, do they? They perform a service, you pay for the service, and everyone's happy. For example, there is no reason why the entire process shouldn't be monetized. A lot of people would pay good money to see those recording sessions, turning a risky long-term investment into immediate profit; the musician would sell a service, like any tradesman.

But no, an "artist" should be able to struggle a couple of years, then watch the money flow in for the rest of his life (plus 70, exactly like a plumber's son... not). Why, it sounds a lot like rent-seeking, that most laudable of economic forces; should we really promote it with such draconian laws?

Btw, to go back about your point about good music being scarce: music that fits the mainstream canon developed by a certain industry in the last 50 years is indeed scarce, probably because it was developed around a model based on scarce distribution resources -- so you over-design one item and make it as marketable as possible to a wide demographic, because your distribution costs are high so you want to make them as repeatable as possible (i.e. you want to make one album and sell a million copies, not ten albums selling a hundred thousand, because you have to modify the physical production line for each album and re-do the whole marketing push through centrally-broadcasted mass- media).

In a world where such limitations are gone, music tastes will develop in different ways. The over-produced album has already been done with -- people buy single items now. Over-production of those single items will probably change as well, as people want faster and faster "updates". Changes in broadcasting are fragmenting tastes, making it very difficult to appeal to everyone, so the "waterfall model" of music production is producing increasingly diminishing returns. The industry will have to move to different models, like quick iterations (you write a song while you tour, and modify it depending on public reaction).

What's so "wrong", so unbearable about all that ? The fact that the Rolling Stones might get a reduced pension? Yeah, they really should be rewarded for ransacking the blues tradition...

<comment><AUTHOR> There is nothing different about the plumber and the artist. The plumber comes to your house and leaves you with a working toilet. The artist goes to the studio and leaves you with a copy of a song. In both cases, you now have something of value created by another person. Both would like to be paid for their work. Last I checked, no artists are selling MP3s to consumers on a per stream royalty basis. They're asking for the same one time payment you pay your plumber, based on you having something of value that they took time to create. You want multiple songs from them? You pay for each, just like you pay your plumber to fix a sink when he's done with the toilet.

There is a perfectly good reason why "the entire process shouldn't be monetized". It's a super big fucking distraction to have people at your recording studio when you're trying to do something that is already extremely difficult. The entire process _IS_ monetized, because you're supposed to pay for the copy of the work you take when it's over.

And for the record, many artists do take songs on the road, try them out, and change them based on public reaction. Then, they come home, spend money and record it. You want a copy? Pay for it.

<comment><USER18> The difference is that the plumber fixes hundreds of sinks, the artist fixes one and then extracts rent from users.

"Last I checked, no artists are selling MP3s to consumers on a per stream royalty basis. "

Still, every time the record is aired in public (bars etc), royalties are paid. And even when selling to consumers, they'll sell a vinyl disk, then a cassette, then a cd, then an .mp3, then a .wtf... and every time, it's the same damn recording, and if you try doing the format shifting yourself, they'd like nothing more than throwing you in jail.

And let's be honest: most record companies and artists ALREADY make more money from merchandise than they make on recordings, the same way comic book publishers make more money from toys than from actual comic books. This myth of the starving artist being robbed of revenue by downloaders is just that, a myth.

Now, where's that cassette that killed music back in the 80s...

<comment><USER19> What if said plumber, instead of fixing each problem individually, develops a robot that will fix the problems on his behalf. Let's say, for argument's sake, that it costs $0.05 to operate the robot during the repair.

Should the plumber charge $0.05 + a small profit or should the plumber charge $0.05 + a large profit to offset the cost of developing the robot? Once the robot is available, it costs the plumber basically nothing to fix your problem, but it took the plumber a sizeable investment to create the robot in the first place.

<comment><USER20> Without replying to what should happen, what will happen is that I'll be able to get my sink fixed for under $1. It's gonna happen. And it sounds awesome!

And I've already wrapped my head around the fact that I'm going to have to be agile to keep figuring out new ways to earn my own paycheque, so that I can afford that $1 repair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They should have done some research before creating the app and changed their business model accordingly (yes I know it is supposed to be a parody).

I think the way to approach the issue is to think what does the population want, because the population elects the government which then makes the law.

Since people are copying music, obviously they want free music. But they also want music. The question is, if copying was legal, would music go away (or decline)? I think for a lot of art forms it is obviously not so. People will create art no matter what, as has been shown over the centuries. Even today, getting rich probably should not be your first motivation when forming a band.

It becomes a problem with art that is very expensive to produce, like movies and computer games. I think part of the solution will be to move those things into Kickstarter mode, that is, make people pay in advance for their creation. In the same vein of course it should be easy to pay people after the creation. Already a lot of people seem to be willing to do so.

This I think also has some precedence in history, when artists typically had some sponsor.

Also of course technology will make those things cheaper to produce too - <USER2> the future it will be possible to simply add actors to your movie with a mouse click. Computers could simulate Tom Hanks, Marylin Monroe or whomever you desire them to simulate. Already today it is probably quite cheap to create the scenery in movies.

</comment><comment><USER22> I didn't recognize it as an allegory until halfway through, because jailbroken iPhones already have a very comprehensive free-cracked-app store, and I can only assume Android users have way more options.

Is this one of the reasons games are all going free+in-app downloads? What's the actual state of mobile app piracy today? It seems like many mobile developers are already moving to alternative models not involving direct sales, whether that's a subscription, virtual goods, or pay-for- addons/upgrades.

<comment><USER23> I'd have thought that it wouldn't be significantly different to crack the in- app content and provide that for free as well, or even repackaged into the original app.

About the only thing that I can think that will defend against this is a streaming/always online service that actively requires cooperation from a server as part of its implementation. Any offline licensing system can and most likely will be cracked eventually, until you end up with the equivalent of CD-keys and server-side detection of duplicates or invalid ones. Even then, if you're only using the remote end for license validation, that code can just be removed - the most viable models are either streaming content (in a way that can't be batched and rehosted/provided locally), or offering compelling multi-player / shared online features that require a valid auth token.

<comment><USER24> It's harder to crack in-app content because authentication of the purchase happens server-side, and because the task of cracking in-app content is different for each app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I must be missing something really obvious here. I haven't used Earbits, but as a streaming service, why not enforce things like this server-side, rather than trying to suppress pirates from distributing the cracked client app?

(No victim-blaming or other moral subtext intended. Just curious.)

<comment><USER26> You're missing the fact that it's about music piracy.

<comment><USER27> I don't see how it has to be about music piracy. Software piracy is just as real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The ideas inherent in selling any form of IP are not sustainable. Our economics are traditionally based on finite resources - and economics involving sale of intellectual property allows an infinite number of transactions.

In my opinion, we can not expect to make money from the straightforward sale of any form of IP for much longer. New models are being developed and services industries are adapting to offer the value that's traditionally been disseminated through IP sale .. this is where the future is heading.

The bleating, repetitive carrion-call of the old guard is becoming increasingly annoying. While their incentive seems obvious; the fact that these organisations are unable to innovate is even more blatant.

<comment><USER14> "Our economics are traditionally based on finite resources"

The finite resources aren't the final product, but the work that goes into it. Create Adobe Photoshop for me (not copy, but build from scratch).

"this is where the future is heading"

I no longer write applications. Everything I release is a service. In the past, there would have only been a one-time fee for my work, but now everyone needs to pay a monthly fee for it.

This is the result of piracy: monthly fees for everything.

<comment><USER28> I completely agree.

Ultimately the most precious resource we have available is time - so I think that our economy should develop to a point where time is seen as the most valued currency.

\--

" _I no longer write applications. Everything I release is a service. In the past, there would have only been a one-time fee for my work, but now everyone needs to pay a monthly fee for it.

This is the result of piracy: monthly fees for everything._"

I think that a service based model is fair - because there are ongoing costs associated with keeping software available. Maybe the only time this model falls down is when a service stagnates and isn't developed past it's initial release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I pirated some music today[0]. I went to my usual shops to try to buy it, and for some reason the label had explicitly decided not to offer downloads of any sort. Just vinyl and CD. I wanted it now, and I couldn't really be arsed with those choices, so I stole it.

What would an honest Android-app allegory for this be? Perhaps a consumer is faced with these options:

1\. An official shop, which accepts money (yay!), gives only some (boo!) of it to the artist, and offers:

a. The source code to build the app (i.e. a plastic disc that you have to rip yourself)

b. maybe, sometimes, a version of the app compiled for a 320x480 screen (acceptable lossy compressed files)

c. maybe, even fewer times, a version of the app compiled to use any screen size (lossless files, or high-quality lossy or whatever you like)

2\. A dodgy (boo!) pirate site, which doesn't accept money (boo!), and offers all of the compiled versions.

Of course this is not even close to reality. No Android apps are compiled by normal end users. All paid Android apps offer 1c. Music piracy does not exist because of religious "information must be free" nuts like this article is talking about -- it exists because people's moral feeling about getting some money to the artist is not strong enough to overcome the inconvenience of 1a (or even 1b). Maybe we should conclude that the analogy has broken down.

Society does not "accept" this sort of piracy like it's a binary switch. The "morals" curve slides down, the "inconvenience" curve slides up, and at some point they pass each other. I see no reason why they can't trade places again -- if we actually try to do something about it instead of spinning clever allegories.

I suspect we need to look elsewhere to understand the motivations of app pirates (yes, I know this was not the point, but if you're going to be facetious...). The real thing is right there, for a few dollars. I've already given Google Checkout my credit card information. I cannot fathom what would make someone deal with sketchy sites (sketchy sites whose entire purpose is to _install executable code on your device_ ) to get the same thing they can just pay for. Maybe they are in fact just religious nuts.

[0] Honestly, I can't even be bothered to pirate most things these days. I'm culturally behind because filling in the gaps in what I can actually buy in FLAC would be a part-time job. If a record shop so much as rejects spaces in my credit card number I get bored and go listen to something I've already bought. This is a problem that could use some, as they say, disruptive innovation.

<comment><USER30> You didn't steal anything (nobody no longer has it because of you), you pirated it.

<comment><USER31> I think nearly everyone here is aware of the distinction. Speaking only for myself, I will continue to say "steal" since both words describe the same action (assuming you're not a prescriptive linguist), and steal better connotes what I believe to be the economic impact.

<comment><USER32> The phone company steals from me every time my DSL fails and I spend an hour on the phone with a tech or by another replacement modem.

HTC steals from me every time the USB cable doesn't dock securely in the port.

Microsoft steals from me every time Windows crashes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For all the potential parallels with the music industry, I think there are quite a few significant differences.

Firstly, what are the current equivalents of a mobile App Store for (pirated) music? There are definitely a bunch of places you can find it if you look, but few of them are as "one-stop-shop" as current app stores.

Secondly, does pirated music often outrank the artists/album name/track titles in general internet searches? Most of the time you'll get the artist, maybe some unofficial fan sites, and some dodgy-SEO lyrics/"free if you pay for our questionable rapidshare style hosting" that probably doesn't even have the content.

If you consider piracy-specific search engines, like TPB or whatever napster/gnutella mutated into, then you're more likely to find real content, but that requires knowing where to look in the first place.

If you consider 'your VC' as an artists music label, then they've probably already got some kind of enforcement system going on. You probably won't have to do all the 'policing' yourself - it's their loss just as much as yours (if not more, due to some of the interesting accounting) if copies aren't getting paid for.

All in all, it seems like a fairly weak metaphor, although I can see how it could become more of a problem in the future.

Edit: I forgot to mention " _They're doing the best they can, they say. Most of all, they're complying with the law, they say._ " - I can't imagine many people who download pirated music do so without realising that it's illegal and/or immoral. Legitimate looking services like streaming sites are harder to judge - they might have a license for the content, or they might not. Compare this to an official platform App Store, where consumers can reasonably expect some level of dilligence in ensuring ownership. And if it becomes necessary, there's some sort of accountability back to the person who uploaded the pirated content.

I imagine the author here chose android because it has a less tightly controlled app store, and it may be possible to create anonymous accounts if you're only dealing with free apps (compared to iOS where you need to have bought a dev license to get any signing keys, even for free apps, as I understand it).

<comment><USER33> >I forgot to mention "They're doing the best they can, they say. Most of all, they're complying with the law, they say." - I can't imagine many people who download pirated music do so without realising that it's illegal and/or immoral. Legitimate looking services like streaming sites are harder to judge - they might have a license for the content, or they might not.

The reference there is to the filesharing sites, not to pirates.

<comment><USER23> Ooops, that's a good point. I suspect that the whole DMCA safe harbour "we honour all correctly submitted takedown requests" is a bit of a get-out for a lot of these sites. Especially the ones that are pretty much basing their entire business model on access to pirated content.

At the same time, there are legitimate indexing & hosting services who probably are genuinely displeased with the abuse of their systems. The same problem as the homebrew console hackers often enabling subsequent game piracy.

The tricky part is how to tell them apart, and what the legitimate concerns can do to prevent abuse, and the content rights-holders can do to deal with the bad-faith lot.

Providing the value/product that consumers are looking for as well is another big deal - from what little I know of mobile app-stores, the low-friction discovery/payment/install process, along with low-cost high volume business models is reducing piracy to some extent. Contrast with music, where DRM, onerous formats, and unavailability of a lot of content is encouraging or even forcing people to go the illegitimate route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Music or software, it's an interesting point. SaaS is one fix.

Bill Gates had problems with copying way back in 1976. It seems to have worked out OK for him. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists>

<comment><USER35> > _Many felt the software should be bundled with the machine and the current > distribution method was Gates' problem. Others questioned the cost of > developing software._

So the rebuttals were "it's hard to get" and "it shouldn't cost that much." Man, I heard that somewhere recently...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> From day one my gut has always told me that Android users are pretty much like Amiga users were back in the day -- the idea of paying for software (any software!) seems like a bad idea. That may be good news if you're Google or a carrier, but it's bad news if you're a developer.

To me fair if Android is part of the "Google way" and maybe the solution is to have advertising bring in revenue (which goes back to AdSense). On the other hand iOS reminds of the Mac back in the day: The users seem to be willing to pay for software -- however that software better be damn good.

So perhaps the solution is to really think of both platforms as being a very different play from each other. Most developers think of their program as something to port between platforms, but maybe that's not what this ecosystem is about? In the same way the games that you would build for Nintendo DS wouldn't even be aimed at the same audience as the Xbox.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. Android is similar to the traditional PC market, so for non-critical software SaaS or advertising are more profitable than shrinkwrap -- unless you stumble on the Android equivalent of MS Office (i.e. something so critical that people will just consider it a natural cost of doing business).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Reading this, I sympathise completely with the developers (being a developer myself). And I also see the uncomfortable parallel with arguments I've seen/made about the music industry.

Poignant.

</comment><comment><USER38> Hint for everyone who has commented so far: this post is not really about apps.

</comment><comment><USER39> If musicians had nearly as much stake in their distributed product, from a percent standpoint, as a startup founder has in his/her business, or if the music industry were remotely as equitable, all things considered, as the software industry, then the essay's apparent allegory might ring a little more true to me. But the practical reality is musicians don't have a similar stake, or a similar chance at making a sustainable living, as software founders.

If I were to reverse The essay's tactic, by way of, for instance, rewriting a paragraph of another certain famous essay about the music industry (which is admittedly dated but still mostly relevant even in the age of iTunes), you could see the contrast pretty quickly. I doubt that anybody would agree that the software industry is this bad. Let's call this hypothetical essay "The Problem with Software" and see if you agree (with apologies to Steve Albini):

"Whenever I talk founders who are about to sign with a major startup incubator, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless Angel Investor at demo day holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed."

Let's say my hypothetical essay goes on to itemize point-by-point in a detailed and authoritative way how startup incubators and VCs virtually always end up screwing over founders and developers every time...well it couldn't because there are no such numbers, no similar data, because in general software startups don't operate that way. The dynamics in the two industries are entirely different and the analogy doesn't work, for various reasons not the least of which is that the average founder has a far higher chance of making money, according to the known risks, than the average musician relying on sales and downloads. VCs, in general are far more equitable (big assumption there but I'll stand by it anecdotely) than the average label, which operates on long-standing numbers-manipulation that rarely if ever compensate artists fairly or transparently. This doesn't make piracy right, it just makes attacking it relatively inconsequential to the artist.

The essay is right, albeit ironically so, about one thing. The music industry has indeed moved on. The future is much more than live events, though, it's innovative business models (like, say, for instance Earbits', which I'm intrigued by and really hope works) and creative manipulation of new media, as bands like Pomplamoose and OK Go have done. The music industry is a dinosaur, and piracy is only a small part of the problem. The main issue is that the music buying public is jaded, fragmented and far less easily manipulated into buying than in the past. The available music is vast in number and the average music fan can listen and partake in countless genres and acts, only a few of which might be shared by friends.

The essay's principles are in the right place -- defending the incomes of musicians, but the allegory ignores a chasm of differences between the two industries, the massive inequity of the music industry towards artists, and the simple truth that there's nothing anyone can do about it, certainly not through the old RIAA/ASCAP/etc. model.

<comment><AUTHOR> The simple fact is that most startup founders not only create the products that define their success, but drive that success almost entirely on their own, with modest help from their investors. As much as everyone likes to hate on record labels, the good ones do almost everything involved in the _business_ of making your music successful. The artist _is_ the product, but very rarely does the artist drive the business. Most are terrible business people. The amount of money a record label puts into a deal might look like a small VC deal. But the amount of _work_ they put in is something else entirely. _That_ is why they take a larger share, and as long as they're fair and do a good job, they deserve a significant amount of the returns.

Their behavior for the past 20 years can be cited as a reason not to want to contribute to them as businesses, but the reality is that, while most artists who have a label make very little, most who don't never make it at all.

<comment><USER39> I'd say this is only partially true. These days labels are not, and I would argue should not be the artists' primary target for income. Touring and new media are things artists have control over to a much larger extent and that's where artists should be focused.

If a good independent label wants to pick you up, like say Bella Union or Merge or Sub Pop (still) or the like then go for it, it might help. Or it might not. For some it's a big deal, but mostly in terms of promotion and profile, better tours. The good labels, like Bella Union, get very involved in that side of it, others not so much. Even then those lucky acts that are on good labels are still primarily touring bands, and downloads and sales and royalties are a small percentage of their income, unless something really breaks on radio, and that my friend is _whole other ballgame_ and extremely rare from the average artists' perspective. Better to hope to get on a TV show or film, raise your profile some and get better tours.

Also, most of the time those higher-profile independent labels came along and were interested because those acts already had something going, some sales, regional numbers or whatnot that made the label relationship more like a partnership.

It helps to go into it from a position of strength, where you know you can walk away. And if you can walk away, you might not even need the Independent label. Mostly you need good management and good promotion to get better tour numbers going, build into a position of strength and really think about what means of income are available to you in an age where access to distribution channels (the primary former attraction of labels) are now available to virtually everyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the same as startup getting investment because they have "traction", and most won't if they don't. And the benefit of having a label is that, while you don't _need_ one to tour and focus on new media, it sure as hell helps to have professional help from people who have done this countless times. There are thousands of independent labels. Some will do nothing for you. Those that do their job can do things that a fraction of 1% of artists can do on their own. Nobody should sit around waiting for a label, but nobody who knows what a good label can do would say they're not extremely valuable and worth signing over some of your "equity" to.

<comment><USER39> This is all true, and it's important to distinguish between "The Industry" and the good indie labels. Bella Union is one I have first-hand knowledge of and they are incredibly fair, and involved in the artists' tours and PR to a large degree.

If you know that's the kind of label you're looking at signing with, great! But the idea that labels are gatekeepers to distribution and royalties is a thing of the past.

Labels work best now when they act more like YC and less like RCA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Who are these people that go to 132 different android app markets to find a free version of the software they see on google's market for $0.99? Are they really the kind of demographic you need to worry about?

</comment><comment><USER41> Is there not a way of giving your app away for free, and then encouraging users to setup some sort of subscription or purchase from within the app if they like it? People regularly provide voluntary financial support (tips, street performers)when it's easy and they see benefit.

Unless the ev1l pirat0rs actually compiled a different version of your app in order to give it away for free without those messages (which seems unlikely given there's absolutely no incentive for them to do so) you'd make a pretty penny through the sheer volume of users.

Imagin busking to an audience of 1 million people, all equidistant from your guitar case with one dollar in their hand?

The scale at which digital distribution allows piracy is the same thing that will make you money: you have free distribution to millions of people, just figure out a way for them to voluntarily give you money and you'll be sorted.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a perfectly fine choice for an artist to make.

If they do not want to do that, and instead would like each person who takes a copy of their work to pay for it, is that not also a choice they should have? Your choice as a consumer should then be to either pay that person for a copy, or not take a copy and move on.

Nobody is arguing that giving away music isn't a viable model for success - simply that it's not ethical to make that choice on behalf of content creators.

<comment><USER41> I find that to be sort of like saying I'm a shop owner. My life would be shitloads easier if I didn't have to actually be there, and people could just put the money on the counter and make their own change (like clerks :)

You're being an idealist - be more pragmatic and you'll live a life less angry.

I may only be speaking for myself here, but I honestly think the law will take a century to catch up here. We're on the frontier - with all the advantages and disadvantages that come with it (one advantage being, for example, the lack of any sort of regulation or licensing getting in the way of being a developer).

<comment><AUTHOR> You're comparing a shop owner who doesn't want to protect their investment because they're lazy to an artist who cannot prevent their product from being taken without being paid for, unless they want to make it unavailable in the format that all of their customers want it in.

It's just sad that asking people to pay for things they take is being an idealist. I'm not angry. I just prefer to speak out against it than act like there's nothing wrong with it.

<comment><USER41> It's not so much that wanting people to pay is being an idealist, but that wanting things to be some way other than way they clearly are is being an idealist.

In another, less sophisticated time, you would have found a reality not far removed from the shop owner I described - and they would not have been considered lazy.

But a shop owner who railed against the shifting sands of humanity, pining for simpler times lost as he was pilfered blind, would clearly be sorrowful idealist.

<comment><USER14> I'm good with this, if you and everyone else who believe this also agrees that if I use your source code in my proprietary app (no matter the license), it's just the "shifting sands of humanity".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> All content producers face the same problem: if their product gains traction, it will be pirated; if it does not gain traction, there will be no revenue.

We just finished a no budget feature film and knew we had to come up with a disruptive distribution strategy to get traction and avoid piracy. Our solution:

everyone who registers to download the movie will get to display a picture, logo or text of their choosing on a billboard in New York's Times Square.

Prices start from only $10 upwards. So for as little as $10 you can get any message / image / logo (as long as it's not obscene and you own the rights) up on a Times Square billboard.

Our strategy seems to be working.

I know this has been mentioned before but filmmakers, programmers, musicians, artists etc all need to think about how to engage an audience as a hook to the content. So by buying the content from the actual producers, they get much more value than just pirating it.

More info on our strategy: <http://bit.ly/pgyGaR> and on the movie <http://bit.ly/n4XQG0> and <http://on.fb.me/qcoACw>

</comment><comment><USER43> I must have missed the back story. Are people really able to just launch cracked versions of apps back to the Google App Store?

<comment><USER44> Read the article again. If you still don't get it, take a look outside the article at the rest of the page :)

<comment><USER45> And in case anyone _still_ doesn't get it, replace "app" with "music", or "song" ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think there should be a new way of control in the app, like only letting people registered on a database use the app, and in that database there should be only users that had paid for that service, but this is more trouble for the user, and users hate this, also piracy sometimes is fault of the user and sometimes is fault of the developer, i had to get some free apps because getting the app is really hard because of the restrictions on my country, but piracy is a problem every developer has so instead of complaining after the app is done, we have to make a contingency plan so we can be ready for all.

</comment><comment><USER47> I know this is only thinly related but I thought I'd post something that I heard from an investor that I met with a few months ago that we decided not to pursue a career with regarding app development for enterprise blackberry stuff... Disclaimer: I'm just posting his point of view and don't necessarily agree with it despite seeing his side of the argument.

My partner (at the time) and I met with him regarding an application we developed during our last year of University that had seen a lot of industry interest during our formal presentation. He wanted to meet with us and discuss helping us market the app because he was close friends with my friend's family and helped students like us previously.

His only real question to us regarding the app was our marketing plan. "Sell it" is not a very good pitch despite us not knowing what-so-ever what we wanted to do with it (or what we were capable of doing without shooing investors away). He brought up the point that whether we want to or not we should not be giving it away for free. Why?

His argument was that if we were to put a few months of effort into development of an app to give away for free we were essentially robbing ourselves. I myself am a strong avocate for OSS and had a hard time agreeing with him, I gave him a perplexing glace in favor of a "wtf". He continued by saying that if we were to dedicate that much time only to give it away we were robbing ourselves of those hours of labour we invested as well as preventing any other student/developer/whatever from being able to make a living from the product line. By us giving away something for free that had a real-world value we robbed others from entering the market to make a dollar.

His argument was that we _must_ charge something for our work and if we don't want to make any money to give the proceeds away to charity. By doing that we could allow others to enter the market and make a dollar to fuel future efforts and development.

Its sort of a funny way to think of things and sometimes I find myself agreeing with him but I'm never certain... I felt the idea of "free software" preventing the developers from making their share of the effort is a good example of how his side of things can be right in many cases.

Again, not saying this is my viewpoint so don't get all "up in my grill" :)

<comment><USER48> I think what's getting lost here is that it's your app. You can do whatever you like with it. Sell it, give it away, flush it down the toilet, smash it with a hammer and burn all your notes. As the people who arranged some bits into a novel configuration, it's your right to choose how you want to distribute it. Obviously, without some way to make a return on investment, it would be difficult to find people to give you money to pay your bills while working on the next thing. But it's your decision to make and no one else's.

When I write an app, it's my right to choose how it is distributed in the world. If I want to sell it for 0.99, then it's my choice and I have to live with the risk of it not selling.

It is just as wrong for someone to take my work without paying for it as it is for me to take your work and sell it. In both cases, our right to choose for ourselves is being taken away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The main problem here is that in the situation described you _would indeed_ pretty much be an idiot not to make your app free and get revenue from ads or other avenues.

Not as a capitulation to piracy, but because you'd _make more money_.

<comment><USER12> Possibly, but it strikes me as unfortunate that someone would have to force ads on their users just to be compensated for their work developing an application.

<comment><USER26> It strikes _me_ as unfortunate that someone would have to force _payment_ on their users just to be compensated for their work developing an application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The reality is that you do pay for stolen music, it just happens over a much longer period of time. The cost is the money you could have made in a society that supports paying for digital content or software.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think Search engine services showed us the way, how one could provide an essential service as free and make money using more subtle ways .. Apps (developers) would have to go down that way eventually ..

</comment><comment><USER48> If you have a right to my app, then I have a right to your paycheck.

Since you obviously don't value the effort that I put into creating my thing, then you must not value the effort that you put into doing your thing.

</comment><comment><USER52> At least two differences between software and music:

\- no malware

\- possible online updates or other interactions

As long as these differences persist, your distribution method can easily add more value than the pirate copy.

<comment><USER18> Music can also provide "online updates or other interactions": think fanclubs, exclusive gigs etc. Say that, when you buy a M.I.A. song, you also get access to an exclusive website/forum for a month, where M.I.A. is going to blog or discuss with fans -- there you go, SaaS. The artist is not forced to do more than she used to, she's just reallocating time from "dealing with the increasingly irrelevant mainstream press" to "dealing with online fans".

The malware point is about quality. You might get the same quality from pirates, but then again you might get malware or simply a crappy rip. If you "buy legit", you are guaranteed good quality: high bitrate / lossless formats, no clicks etc.

The more I think about it, the more I see the two markets are fundamentally identical... which makes the music industry look even more stupid: with all their might and cash, they seem unable to be as profitable as some kid in California with a couple of computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Before commenting about Android, read the article twice, look around the page, and if you still want to talk about Android, read one of the related posts.

</comment><comment><USER53> If musicians spent half as much time paying attention in economics class as they did strumming their guitars, they might understand the situation a little better.

"Piracy" exists for one reason and one reason alone: the price is too high for the consumer. There will always be a subset of the economy that will steal a particular good (i.e. for whom the price is always too high), from CD's to clothing to Ferrari's. This criminal element is simply a cost of doing business, really. In a healthy market, their costs are easily absorbed by a much larger subset that is prepared to pay the set price of the good. Match demand for the product reasonably well with supply and everyone is happy.

When a product is priced at a level that is greater than the market values, problems emerge. In open/free markets, you tend to get competition and innovation, and individual business losses. In closed/highly regulated markets, you tend to get black markets, bootlegging and all sorts of evasion if demand is high enough to warrant. This is as true for music and software as it is for gasoline, alcohol and copper wire. Music piracy is simply a black market that is only sustained because enough of the market thinks the price is too high.

The labels that have tightly controlled the market for music (commoditizing something that 50% of the population can supply) have done so by closing all distribution channels and limiting any real supply in order to exaggerate demand. Consumers didn't really know that they were being ripped off, since the supply chain was so tightly controlled. That changed with Napster.

Once the entire industry was exposed, and music began to revert back to a more natural value that one would expect for such a large supply, the market's opinion of the product began to change as well. (To be honest the shift probably went too far to the other side, but it started to regulate as things like itunes emerged)

What's evident is that there is clearly a value above zero that the market will place on music. If this wasn't the case, iTunes wouldn't be around. The problem that most labels - and sadly artists - fail realize is that the particular dollar point could be a lot lower than they would like it to be. Probably more like $.50 a song rather than the current $.99 cent price point.

The market will determine that price though, not the suppliers. Until then, major piracy will continue. Find that price point though, and piracy will go back to meaning peg legs and eye patches.

<comment><AUTHOR> No other industry deals with people being able to copy their product flawlessly and eliminate any scarcity of the final package like music does, which you don't need an education in economics to understand the impact of. There is almost no reason to assume that $0.50 will convert better among people who pirate music now, since those peoples' current price is free. And if you don't think a song is worth $0.99, maybe you should pay more attention to what goes into creating one than just what goes into copying one when it's finished. The scarcity is not in the distribution, it's in the 20+ year process that goes into creating the original mold in the first place. The supply is unlimited because people make it so illegally and without regard for the rights' of content owners or the hard work they put into making products that millions of people enjoy. It's not a practice that should be defended on any level, let alone justified in a debate about free markets. Piracy is lazy and cheap, and that is all.

<comment><USER54> > No other industry deals with people being able to copy their product > flawlessly and eliminate any scarcity of the final package like music does

That's just plain not true. Film, TV, videogames, books, comics and news all fall under this. And I'm sure there's more industries I haven't thought of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not saying none of them deals with it, just none of them deals with it in the magnitude or frequency that music does. Most of those things lose some of their original qualities, are harder to find, or take too long to download for the average person to steal them. MP3s get it the worst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> > After ranting endlessly on Hacker News and the like, finally the person who > keeps stealing your app posts a reply.

In the entire time I've visited HN, I don't think this has ever happened. This is the equivalent to a politician visiting poor neighbourhoods dressed like 50 cent, hoping to "level" with the community. So contrived.

</comment><comment><USER56> Maybe app developers should now form a group like MPAA?

<comment><USER57> They already did, it's called the BSA‡

And they solicit informants to report piracy (with lucrative rewards).

‡ <http://www.bsa.org/country.aspx?sc_lang=en>

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> interesting read, though it wont change anyones mind on piracy one way or the other

</comment><comment><USER10> Can't wait for the sequel: "I Think My Patents Should Never Expire"

</comment><comment><USER59> > They tell you your business model is broken

And they have a point.

</comment><comment><USER60> Well I think you should work for free as well then.

</comment><comment><USER61> People like Mr. Flores are a hazard. Seriously, they have no problem defining piracy as wrong, but make no mention of what would actually be required in terms of surveillance and policing for that moral convention to be reliably maintained.

Beyond his insensitivity to reality, Mr. Flores appears to have no understanding that copyrights are not rights at all. There's noting inalienable about them. To the contrary, they are - very explicitly - privileges. They are given to very limited numbers of people for (theoretically) limited times. For a sovereign society to continue giving out these privileges, it's going to expect something in return. If that includes an obscenely invasive and overbearing police apparatus that has the power and freedom to monitor every bit of data every person exchanges it's an easy deal to reject.

In spite of all his rage (or perhaps because of it) Mr. Flores has never stopped to consider that the crime of theft pertains chiefly to physical property and tangible goods. This has been true for thousands of years, meaning that there is now a very well established body of law relating to misappropriation of physical goods - one that extends, in various forms, worldwide. And there is no popular pressure to change this convention. Nor is there any sense that the policing required to maintain this convention constitutes a serious threat to human rights. Indeed, the creation of property rights, and their attachment to tangible goods seems to be a fundamental feature of societies that advance human rights, and a culture of autonomy.

Extending the concept of property rights and theft to intangible goods is a different matter entirely. A relatively recent idea, it was an experiment that worked reasonably well as long as intangible goods remained wedded to some physical wrapper which could be safely governed by uncontroversial property laws. Now that the wrappers have become obsolete, the ability to allow the safe and ethical extension of property rights into the sphere of the intangible has collapsed. Only reckless, short-sighted, or truly sinister players (the Maximalists) continue to press in this direction.

Smarter - and yes, more ethical - people properly dismiss copyright as an appropriate mechanism for governing the conduct of private individuals. That means they don't get involved in business that can only work if the Maximalists get their way. While copyright certainly retains substantial value as a tool for regulating the conduct of incorporated entities (which are, themselves, intangible entities), it is 100% incompatible with a culture of individual autonomy in the present day.

The world probably doesn't need (yet another) shitty app. What it does need are people who can imagine and build businesses that limit reliance on copyright to engagements with incorporated entities, while treating individual humans with healthy respect for their political freedom, privacy, and autonomy. Indeed, entrepreneurs should focus on products and services that INCREASE these qualities, not misguided attempts to undermine them for the sake of a fast buck with no concern given to the consequences.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why does someone need to propose an effective solution to policing immorality in order to state that he believes something to be immoral? Simply conveying a story intended to create empathy for hard working individuals making a contribution to society is hazardous? Get off your high horse.

Saying that you believe people have rights that should not be infringed does not mean you haphazardly support the enforcement of those rights in ways that cause more harm than good. I did not recommend that anyone be sued, that anyone be monitored, that anyone be spied upon or any other counter measure. Speaking out against injustice does not always require that you have a well- articulated plan for the foolproof solution to that injustice. The fact that you believe these people have no rights and that defending them is harmful is hazardous.

The simple fact is, for as long as there have been civilizations and law, most have said it is illegal to take something of value from someone else. You say it pertains only to physical goods, a cop out designed to suit your self serving needs.

There are two important facts to remember. The first is that, while taking a copy of something from someone is not theft according to Merriam Webster, if their product is valued and people will pay for it, but you take a copy under false pretenses and make it available for nothing at all, you dilute the value of their property and have stolen _value_ from them. Imagine your investors diluting you down to nothing. They haven't technically taken your shares, but I suspect you don't like too much the results.

Further, while the flow of information and ideas should be free, nobody is infringing on your right to remember a song, take thoughts of it with you, tell other people about it, or even hum that song while you troll the forums. But when you require a _physical_ copy of that song, bits stored on a device, in order to actually _remember_ that "idea", your whole concept of the "flow of information" goes out the window.

You want to spread the idea of a song? Tell someone what it's about. You want a copy of a song for yourself, pay for it. It's as simple as that. I don't need to be a policy maker to voice that this is a principle I value among those people who have the integrity to honor it.

<comment><USER61> Kudos for identifying dilution as a way to take value from another while leaving their actual holdings untouched. It's a subtle point that most anti- copyright types miss.

And you're absolutely correct to observe that hard drives are material, and that the atoms they contain constitute the 'fixed medium' that provides the bright and shining line between ungovernable ideas, and the restricted world of copyright protection. But you're mistaken if you think you have any inviolable rights in your work. Copyright is a right in name only. In absolutely every other regard it's a privilege.

If you lived in France, things would be different. French jurisprudence includes "le droit d'auteur". That is to say, they recognize a moral right of the author to control the dissemination and development of his work by others. When the French say "I have a right" they're entirely correct.

Things are different in America, where lawmakers rejected that concept flatly. Regardless of the way you feel about it, Le droit d'auteur has never been recognized in this country, and at this point, it's safe to say it never will be.

So it's not that I 'believe' you have no rights. I KNOW you have no rights. Because you don't. What you have is a privilege that 's increasingly archaic, based - as it is - on a rapidly fading ability to produce more development than it retards in the "Useful Arts & Sciences". In case you didn't know, that's the Constitutional language giving Congress the power to issue the limited monopolies known as patents and copyrights in the first place.

In contrast with France, America (like England, which is the source of much American civil law) views copyright not as an exalted moral right, but as a necessary evil tolerable only to the extent that it clearly benefits society as a whole.

That's a big difference.

Wrap your head around the idea that you're defending a privilege - not a right - and I suspect that the whole tenor of your argument will change dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> OMGWTFBBQ!</comment>


Click to see how latency feels - <AUTHOR> http://ryanwitt.github.io/latency-demo/ <comment><USER2> I really started to notice the latency around 100ms</comment>


A beginner's guide to Big O notation (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://rob-bell.net/2009/06/a-beginners-guide-to-big-o-notation/ <comment><USER2> On the topic of efficient algorithms, I recently read a nice note in an Algorithms textbook -

> _It would appear that Moore's law provides a disincentive for developing > polynomial algorithms. After all, if an algorithm is exponential, why not > wait it out until Moore's law makes it feasible? But in reality the exact > opposite happens: Moore's law is a huge incentive for developing efficient > algorithms, because such algorithms are needed in order to take advantage of > the exponential increase in computer speed._

 _Here is why. If, for example, an O(2n) algorithm for Boolean satisfiability (SAT) were given an hour to run, it would have solved instances with 25 variables back in 1975, 31 variables on the faster computers available in 1985, 38 variables in 1995, and about 45 variables with today's machines. Quite a bit of progress—except that each extra variable requires a year and a half's wait, while the appetite of applications (many of which are, ironically, related to computer design) grows much faster. In contrast, the size of the instances solved by an O(n) or O(n log n) algorithm would be multiplied by a factor of about 100 each decade. In the case of an O(n2) algorithm, the instance size solvable in a fixed time would be multiplied by about 10 each decade. Even an O(n6) algorithm, polynomial yet unappetizing, would more than double the size of the instances solved each decade. When it comes to the growth of the size of problems we can attack with an algorithm, we have a reversal: exponential algorithms make polynomially slow progress, while polynomial algorithms advance exponentially fast! For Moore's law to be reflected in the world we need efficient algorithms._

<comment><USER3> In the quote, O(2n) and O(n6) are meant to be O(2^n) and O(n^6), right?

<comment><USER2> Yup, that's correct. Sadly, I can't update the comment now :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like someone finally got it to the front page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rob- bell.net](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rob-bell.net)

<comment><USER5> Looks like the asymptotic complexity of getting this article to the frontpage is pretty high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > O(N) describes an algorithm whose performance will grow linearly and in > direct proportion to the size of the input data set

Nitpick, but this is technically wrong. There needs to be a "no faster than" somewhere in there. Merge sort is, for example, included in O(2^n) by the actual definition of big O (vs big theta, which is defined as a tight bound). So there exist algorithms that are O(N) that don't grow linearly.

f(x) is O(g(x)) just means there is some constant K such that f(x) <= Kg(x) for all x beyond some value. This has nothing to do with 'worst case performance'.

<comment><USER7> You'll be a lot happier if you mentally replace O(n) with Theta(n) every time you see it, rather than feeling the need to nitpick when you know that that's what people mean when they say O(n), 99% of the time.

<comment><USER8> Problem is that Theta(n) is an almost useless notation.

Thus, most times people say O(n) on practice[1], they mean O(n). But most times people define O(n), they cite the Theta(n) definition.

It isn't hard to put an "up to", "no more than" or "or less" at the definition, and it does not make it threatening or hard to read.

[1] There's probably a small corner in Hell reserved for people that mean O(n) _on average_ but refuse both to say that qualifier and care about what data distribution created that average.

<comment><USER6> There seems to be a misconception here that this has something to do with best/average/worst case input. "f(x) is O(g(x))" is a purely mathematical statement about two functions, and means that f(x) is smaller than or equal to (K times) g(x) for all x beyond some threshold. I.e. O(g(x)) is a set of functions that includes f(x).

When we say "quicksort is O(g(n))" for some g we also need to specify, or assume, the distribution of the input (i.e. best/average/worst case), and we are free to assume whatever distribution we like. Then, assuming that distribution, the running time of the algorithm is just a function of the input size, and we can use the above definition to make a statement about that function (i.e. what complexity class it is in).

A complete statement looks like "quicksort is O(n^2) in the worst case", which means "for every n, pick the list of length n that takes the longest to sort (i.e. the worst-case input), and the number of steps executed by quicksort will be no more than Kn^2 as long as n is large enough, for some fixed K".

The difference between O, Theta and Omega only concerns what functions the set contains - in particular, Theta(g(x)) is a subset of O(g(x)). _This is a separate issue to whether we are talking about best /average/worst case input._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like this page [http://bigocheatsheet.com/](http://bigocheatsheet.com/)

Espcially the graph which hammers home how quickly things go wrong.

<comment><USER10> That table is so wrong it makes me mad.

<comment><USER11> In what way? Having skimmed it, I see a couple of minor mistakes but the bulk of it seems correct.

The chart says you can search a Cartesian tree in O(log n) expected time, but I don't see how that's possible given that there's no ordering between a node's children.

Also, it's possible to do mergesort in O(1) space; in fact, it's one of the exercises in TAOCP, if I recall correctly. But the algorithm is so complicated that nobody uses it in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article is mostly good, but I have one nitpick.

> An example of an O(2^N) function is the recursive calculation of Fibonacci > numbers

No, the naive recursive evaluation of the Fibonacci sequence has complexity O(1.618^N) (or just O(Fib(n)). It is _unequal_ to O(2^N) because the base of the power is different.

<comment><USER13> Technically 1.618^N is still O(2^N) but I agree with your point.

<comment><USER14> I was about to correct you until I realized you used big-O instead of big- theta notation.

Informally we tend to use big-O to mean big-theta which only adds to the confusion.

<comment><USER13> Actually we don't use it informally as big-Theta, because big-Theta assumes that the lower and upper bound are asymptotically the same.

For example Quicksort is O(n^2) but Omega(nlogn) it is neither Theta(nlogn) nor Theta(n^2).

You probably meant that informally we just assume that the stated bound is as tight as possible.

<comment><USER15> > _For example Quicksort is O(n^2) but Omega(nlogn) it is neither Theta(nlogn) > nor Theta(n^2)._

No, this is flat out wrong. Big O is an upper bound on an asymptotic growth rate. Big Omega is a lower bound on the asymptotic growth rate. Big Theta is a tight bound on the asymptotic growth rate. These are independent to the average case, best case, or worst case run time of a given algorithm.

Quicksort has an average run time of Theta(n lg n). Equivalently, its average run time is O(n lg n) and Omega(n lg n). It has a worst case run time of Theta(n^2). Equivalently, its worst case run time is O(n^2) and Omega(n^2).

> _Actually we don 't use it informally as big-Theta,_

Wrong again.

<comment><USER16> You can state that quicksort has run time O(n^2). The function you're describing with O(n^2) is f : S -> R, where S is the set of input values and R is the set of real numbers, and f(x) is the running time of running quicksort on input value x, and n : S -> N is the _size_ of input value x. The notation O(g(n)) describes the function f in terms of the function n.

That f is in O(g(n)) means there exist constants C and N_0 such that for all x in S, provided that n(x) >= N_0, it is true that |f(x)| <= |C g(n(x))|.

And that f is in Omega(g(n)) means there exist C > 0 and N_0 such that for all x in S, provided that n(x) >= N_0, it is true that |f(x)| >= |C g(n(x))|.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Common mistake. When people say O(2^n) they USUALLY mean something closer to 2^O(n).

The reason is that f(n) = O(g(n)) means that for some constant k and integer N, if N < n then |f(n)| < kg(n). In other words "grows no faster than a constant times". However when you've got exponential growth the slightest of things can cause the exponent to be slightly different, or there to be a small polynomial factor.

That was the case in his example. (The exponent was different.)

</comment><comment><USER18> The best layman's example of O(log N) I've heard is finding a name in the phone book. You open it around the middle, select which half gets you closer, and repeat. It's then easy to "get" why it's not a big deal if it's a huge phone book versus a tiny phone book.

<comment><USER19> That seems more like a layman's explanation of a binary search than O(log N). Binary search just happens to be O(log N)

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure how drawing that distinction helps a layman.

<comment><USER19> Clarifying something as an example of a principle instead of the principle itself seems pretty important, regardless of lay status.

<comment><USER18> Ah, when you phrase it that way I see what you mean, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice! Very succinct and clear. I wrote an intro myself, as someone who'd recently learned the concept. Wordier, but might be helpful if you think like I do. [http://nathanmlong.com/2015/03/understanding-big-o- notation/](http://nathanmlong.com/2015/03/understanding-big-o-notation/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Super interesting comparing this to the one we have on Interview Cake: [https://www.interviewcake.com/article/big-o-notation-time- an...](https://www.interviewcake.com/article/big-o-notation-time-and-space- complexity)

I like how Rob Bell's piece has headings with the most common time costs-- sorta makes it easier to see at a glance what you're going to get, and I imagine gives folks a quick sense of, "Right, I've seen that! Been /wondering/ what that means."

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the nicest way to learn this if you don't have a formal CS education is to still pick up a Discrete Math text book (like Chapter 3 in Rosen) and then read chapters 3 and 4 in CLRS.

<comment><USER23> If something puzzles you, don't be afraid to start drawing yourself a diagram. O(n^2) vs. O(n) amortized for naive string concatenation vs. growing a buffer by doubling:

      x
      xx
      xxx
      xxxx
      xxxxx
      xxxxxx
      xxxxxxx
      xxxxxxxx

      x
      xx
      xxxx
      xxxxxxxx

This can be a good way of getting an intuitive feel for what's going on. Note in the 2nd case, you can stack all of 1st two rows representing cost into the 3rd row. In fact, you can always stack the execution costs into row (n-1) and never exceed the size of row n.

<comment><USER22> Looks like you're alluding to the recurrence tree method for solving recurrences mentioned in CLRS. And you're right, it's a great way to visualize and get an intuitive feel of big-oh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be sensible to put the terms like "constant" and "logarithmic" in there, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there a beginner's guide to proving different time complexities?

</comment><comment><USER25> > O(N) describes an algorithm whose performance will grow linearly and in > direct proportion to the size of the input data set.

Argh, I hate this every time I see Big O notation covered.

Big O != performance. If you have an O(N) algorithm that walks the data set in the order that it's laid out in memory(assuming contiguous data) it _will_ beat your O(NlogN) and sometimes even O(logN).

[edit]meant to omit nlogn, that's what I get for any early morning rant pre- coffee.

Radix Sort is the classic example I always bring up. On machine word size keys, with a separate pointer look-up table(to get final value) it will beat QSort, MergeSort and all the other NlogN sorts by 10-50x. This includes having to walk the data 3-4 times depending on how you want to split the radix to line up with cache sizes.

Friends don't let Friends use Big O to describe absolute performance.

<comment><USER26> > If you have an O(N) algorithm that walks the data set in the order that it's > laid out in memory(assuming contiguous data) it will beat your O(NlogN)

Not sure what you're trying to say with this particular statement. Of course it will. NLogN grows way faster than N.

And Radix sort is of course drastically faster than comparison sorts if the word size is smaller than logN regardless of the particularities of the implementation.

People don't and shouldn't use big O to describe absolute performance but it's a great place to start and you can't reach the level of implementation details performance tuning if you can't understand or formalize the basics.

But you do have a point overall.

In practice, performance may be different. Big O assumes a particular 'virtual machine' with a particular word size and a particular time it takes to execute an instruction.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, meant to omit NlogN there, I blame it on lack of coffee.

My meta point is the constant factors that Big O throws out usually end up dominating real-world performance.

<comment><USER27> That's why some Data Stuctures courses use tilde notation instead (same as big O, but the constant is preserved).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Front Row Seat with SeatGeek Co-founder, Russell D'Souza - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-robert-casey/a-front-row-seat-with-sea_b_545375.html

<comment><USER2> IMO the best part of their site isn't the Farecast -- it's the interface for choosing seats. You can see at a glance what seats are available and how the prices compare to face value.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was in DreamIt last summer. Russ and the SeatGeek team were some of the hardest-working people I've ever seen.

<comment><USER4> And they still are. Awesome guys to work with and real humble too. Haven't met a pair of people more focused on their goals than Russ and Jack yet.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wish I thought of that

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure it was that hard to be like, "you know what, I'll do Farecast for sports and concerts" as an idea. It's the execution that impresses me, but the idea was obvious the day Farecast proved that you could pull it off.</comment></comment>


Apollo: Spotify's Java libraries for writing micro-services - <AUTHOR> http://spotify.github.io/apollo/ <comment><USER2> I quite like how the page pays homage to the visual style of the Apollo Program documentation (e.g. [http://history.nasa.gov/ap12fj/pdf/a12_sa507-flightmanual.pd...](http://history.nasa.gov/ap12fj/pdf/a12_sa507-flightmanual.pdf)).

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like a use-case that a whole lot of people are excited about since microservices are presently in vogue. What would make me want to choose Apollo over, say, Dropwizard ([http://dropwizard.io](http://dropwizard.io)) if we assume that I'm not a developer at Spotify?

<comment><USER4> If you compare the "Getting Started" sections for both frameworks (Dropwizard's is here: [http://www.dropwizard.io/0.9.1/docs/getting- started.html](http://www.dropwizard.io/0.9.1/docs/getting-started.html)), it looks like the initial setup for Apollo is a lot less complex. This may be a significant advantage, because it cuts down project setup time, which is one of the annoying parts of microservices.

However, I can imagine having to pay for this once you need some more advanced features. Dropwizard comes with a lot of stuff for configuration management and integration, which I guess is mostly missing in Apollo.

<comment><USER5> Really? The dropwizard example looks almost identical except for an extra Config related class (which seems like a more sane design to me) and 2 extra methods to implement. Not sure I'd call it a lot less complex.

I think what is happening is the getting started guide for dropwizard looks significantly more _indepth_ than the Apollo guide, covering some features that are entirely optional (and may not even be supported by Apollo.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting difference in attitude I notice. The java (i suppose) devs commenting have the general attitude of "give me one good reason to use this instead of X". In contrast when a new javascript framework is posted people go "yay, this looks awesome, congratulations! I will try it for my next project!".

I tend to have an attitude similiar to the java side. I wouldn't say the javascript attitude doesn't have benefits though.

<comment><USER7> I don't see an issue with having more available options, especially in the fast moving JS world.

I think it's more important to consider the support behind a technology vital to your stack so you can expect to regularly integrate improvements, security fixes, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, in the startup world at least, I always hear JAVA IS DEAD! DOWN WITH JAVA!

But this library, a bunch of Google stuff, most of Netflix's stuff -- it seems like the real, this-makes-money work is still done in Java. Am I wrong? Is Java not dead at all?

<comment><USER9> If Java was dead, they wouldn't have to shout down with Java. Rumors of Java's death have been greatly...oh, you know.

Java's in the running to be the world's most widely used programming language. This is, in large part, due to Android.

[http://news.softpedia.com/news/the-top-10-all-time- programmi...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/the-top-10-all-time-programming- languages-on-github-489852.shtml#sgal_0)

It so happens that a lot of companies have bet their stacks on Java. Java is the language of Hadoop. In addition to the companies you mention, there's Amazon, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. (There are plenty of other great languages that outperform Java in one way or another, but this post is just to make that point that Java is far from dead...)

It's a stable language with a huge ecosystem, that's growing all the time. Our project, [http://deeplearning4j.org](http://deeplearning4j.org), gives it deep neural networks that run distributed...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure why they'd write all these libraries from scratch instead of just reusing something like Play or Dropwizard that are more used and thus probably better supported and have more of the kinks worked out. Wish they'd explain that up front.

<comment><USER11> Have you tried play framework? Because it installs a lot of libraries and let's not talk about performance.

<comment><USER12> I'm using the Play framework. I run it on dedicated hardware, so the few extra MB of disk space doesn't bother me.

I know you don't like talking about it, but do you have something to share about its performance?

<comment><USER11> It's not a matter of a few extra MB, but number of libraries, more libraries equals more bugs equals more problems.

I'm not saying only play has this problem, almost all java frameworks from the time of play have similar properties.

On the other hand, it is slow, embarrassingly slow (try running it on RPi). For me it's really complicated as well. You have routes file (which is redundant). Templating language forces you to write Scala which then uses a Scala compiler to compile which it is really slow (even Martin said it's slow). It's a vicious circle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not sure about that name. A bit too close to ActiveMQ's Apollo [1] for my liking. The functional areas aren't that dissimilar.

[1] - [https://activemq.apache.org/apollo/](https://activemq.apache.org/apollo/)

<comment><USER14> I bet Apollo is a fairly commonly used name. As one example, Amazon's internal deployment system is named Apollo: [http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/apollo-amazon- de...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/apollo-amazon-deployment- engine.html)

It's probably a stretch to say that Amazon's Apollo has a bigger "market share", because it's not on the market. AWS CodeDeploy may be similar--haven't checked it out. Nevertheless, the Amazon Apollo's user base is probably way bigger than ActiveMQ's or Spotify's Apollo :)

Also, it seems the Greeks have stolen the name for one of their gods too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Spring Boot, Dropwizard, and Apollo all seem to try to do the same thing. They all seem easy to use, more or less opinionated with Spring Boot being the most opinionated. The one thing in Apollo I find quite interesting is the native integration of async-ness. Very nodeJs like but could also be achieved in Spring Boot or Dropwizard with Reactor. I do think Dropwizard would have been THE framework to extend here with some async sugar. But hey, developers love to build their own things.

</comment><comment><USER16> Putting resources behind dropwizard would have been a better approach. Dropwizard needs some love on the admin/ops UI sides.

<comment><USER17> What do you think is missing in Dropwizard from an admin/ops point of view?

<comment><USER16> I am using DW 0.9.x. I miss an admin interface like django admin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks cool, but looks like they waited too long to release it. I would like to see some benchmarks, but _humbly_ think that it can come no where near Rapidoid ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10729868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10729868)) which in my opinion is more elegant and complete.

</comment><comment><USER18> What are you using for service discovery and registration? I took a quick look through the docs but didn't see this mentioned.

<comment><USER19> They used to use dns, i think. Not sure if they still use that.

I read about it some time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What are the advantages of using these libraries over Playframework which IMO is more complete and batteries included?

</comment><comment><USER21> Diagrams are really good looking, anyone know of a tool to create attractive diagrams, quickly?

</comment><comment><USER22> How is this different than dropwizard?</comment>


TLS performance overhead and cost on GNU/Linux - <AUTHOR> http://david-grs.github.io/tls_performance_overhead_cost_linux/ <comment><USER2> Just a heads up that this is about thread-local storage, not transport layer security.</comment>