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Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

I agree with everything you said, but it seemed like a lot of the more nuanced feedback on this was drowned out by a subset of gamers having a screaming tantrum at the suggestion of paying anything for a mod, regardless of where the money was going.

I'm hopeful that Valve will eventually try this again on a new game with a fairer compensation structure and a better community infrastructure in place. I'm not so hopeful that that same subset of gamers won't have a tantrum all over again.

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It might be something that could work for a new game, but in the case of skyrim, I don't see any kind of paid mod system working.

Skyrim has a very complex modding system, and a lot of skyrim mods have dependencies on other skyrim mods, so when you start putting any mods behind a paywall things get dicey real fast.

It could only see this working in a game where mods are simple and standalone.

I wonder what kind of infrastructure could fix this. Imagine a official phone store where anyone could upload a app, and no platform API that dictate what the software can do.

In the case that a phone got bricked, can the store owner just shrug it off? If malware was injected, who is to blame? When something suddenly breaks because conflicting apps, is that the customers fault? Does it matter if the app was sold 14 days ago, 30 days ago, 1 year?

It would make for a nice reading for a solution to this problem that would handle all of this, while retaining fully compatibility with consumer laws and customers trust in the market.

I've learned that there's at least two hard rules when it comes to money for digital services

1) It's almost impossible to start charging for something that was free

2) It's almost impossible to go from one time payment to subscription model.

If you want either model you better start out with them or you're going to have a vengeful mob after you. I've seen this repeated time after time with catastrophic results. I was actually surprised that Adobe got away with it.

I wonder what would happen if GitHub placed a clone fee and split it between itself and the repo owner...

If that was an option, but not the only option, it could make for an interesting addition to their business model.

  * Public repositories (fork for free)  
  * Premium repositories (fork for a fee)  
  * Private repositories (restricted to content owner who pays the fee)

So basically, GitHub offering a service where users could charge for software, and get the source code as well? And not just a core dump, but be part of a community building up that source? ...That's a pretty solid idea.

^ this.

If anyone is interested in building it, send me a note, I'd love to be involved (but totally lack the skills to do it myself).

Heck, me too—I can think of several projects I worked on but eventually gave up on. If there was a way for me to get paid for it, still work on it, and have other people help out as well? Without having to operate my own storefront?

My understanding is that that's how software distribution used to work back in the mainframe days - you'd get the source to build in your specific environment, and you could modify it to add whatever functionality you needed. Then binary distribution took over as platforms became more intercompatible.

And you still can do that—supply the source when you sell an app. But to be able to not just give your customers the source, but to give them access to a GitHub project that they can follow, and submit pull requests to, and pull new updates and so on from... plus, to not have to set up your own storefront, and manage the source permissions and whatnot. That would be a very nice feature for GitHub to have.

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