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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

devils advocate here

to be honest, expensive, proprietary tools like Airtable, Notion, Retool deserve to be copied

why would you pour significant resources into something that one day can and probably will disappear, cancelled or priced out?

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I think when criticizing paid software, and paid SaaS, it's a mistake to think their alternative is logically open-source software. It's actually ad-driven software, because a profitable paid service has to provide much more to you than just the code like open-source does, and that costs money.

I relish tools that just let me pay for them and cut out the middle-man. The idea that all software should be free has contributed to the hyper commercialized, invasive, ad-funded internet we have now.

Because in the current environment it's easy to leverage VC money to stay just-ahead in the user-acquisition race, while the early employees extract very nice salaries and build their networks -- which they can use to find their next role when the gravy train ends.

It really doesn't matter a bit if the product survives in the marketplace or not. It just needs to 'succeed' in the short term.

all these companies are going to die as soon as they run out of VC-money or can't sustain the growth to get new money

VC-startups are glorified MLMs for early employees and investors

Those are all okay because they don't use an openly replicated linked list with byzantine fault tolerance. The ones using an openly replicated linked list with byzantine fault tolerance are the only ones that should be subject to scrutiny and public fits of outrage. If they are using PostgreSQL on AWS, there is no issue.

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