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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

I'm always fascinated by the way institutionalized dishonesty creeps into entire industries. From used car salesmen to film moguls, once a certain practice has ossified over the years into "everyone in the biz does it", practices that would result in jail time in other industries are simply accepted as business as usual. Even more curious, everyone to the man knows its wrong, but no one moves to change it. The emperor has no clothes and we just like him better naked.

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Many would say the same thing about the software industry.

There was actually a time in the 1980s when software developers got a percentage of profits. I remember working at WordPerfect in the late 80s and seeing some of the developers houses - one guy built a medieval castle complete with a working moat and drawbridge.

At the time I was hired in '89 or so they were doing away with that practice. "New developers don't get royalties any more."

But, it was a good business to be in for a short time. I'm not sure if Microsoft developers ever enjoyed royalties.

Its still a good business to be in

And then due to some Microsoft court case in 1999, they also did away with permanent contractors as well (now after 1 year, you must be incorporated).

Who did this benefit? Not the government, they lose taxes as now the contractors have to incorporate (filtering your income through an S-corp allows you to deduct all sorts of expenses). Not the contractors who now have to maintain and run a corporation.

It's always the corporations who benefit. Corporations are largely owned by the massively wealthy.

You can't be the 1st to change; you'd get run over.

Only if you were unable to actually turn a net profit.

What would happen instead is that more actors and writers would be willing to work with you because they knew they'd get a fair share of the whole deal.

The problem there, is that the talent that would truly help you succeed can already demand gross participation from any studio. And the rest, while they would undoubtedly prefer to work for an honest studio, would climb over one another to land almost any work regardless of accounting policy.

That is the attitude of all the people who later look at a either a working process, or a working product and say, "damn, why didn't I think of that?"

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