Maybe this is not the topic you were going for but this triggers me because I've long wondered how to do pricing fairly in general. If you're a monopolist or in a highly competitive market, what strategy could you use regardless to arrive at a fair price? I think the answer is cost + a little bonus because nothing else really works. If I had to pay the value it brings me for everything in life... what are my glasses worth, half my salary? The work computer (as an IT person) is maybe three quarters of my salary? That already does not add up and I still haven't paid for the food I need or my office chair
The person who makes it knows the cost price and needs to set a price for money to work, I think. Which is not to say that donations can't work, you can always feel free to make an exception and give the author a good day, but it wouldn't work as a general payment model I don't think
An obvious candidate in this case would be the pro-rata share of the cost of creation. Possibly offset by ability to pay, e.g. if you can afford to pay a little more then do so because some people can't afford to pay as much and you still want the overall total to cover the cost.
It's an eternal struggle. The "perfect capitalist" wants infinite money with zero cost labor. The "perfect consumer" wants high quality products for free delivered instantly.
Even if we assume a more altruistic ideal, a businessman needs enough money to keep providing their services. But as the economy gets worse, that breaking point becomes less and less obtainable for a reasonable consumer (who's price is "cheap enough to maintain their QoL"). You can't really fix that without lobbying to being down living expenses as a whole.
"Price" is not being used in a completely literal sense here. The core of the comment is how to calculate "value they received", and neither person involved would say it's $0.
I fully understand what they are saying. I'm saying it doesn't matter. There is a group of people that believe anything above free is too much. For both software and books.
If you're talking about people that think nothing should be paid, then kundi is not one of those people, and you're responding in the wrong place.
If you're talking about people that think payment should be optional but encouraged, then your "There is no pricing that would satisfy the person" "it doesn't matter" argument is incorrect. It does matter to those people and you can have a productive discussion about the correct amount.
Encouraging people to donate does nothing. People are encouraged to donate to open source and you see how many open source projects the internet depends on that are wildly underfunded. Maybe you believe people are more charitable than I do.
There is a group of people that believe getting less money than the maximum they can is too little. Let's not base business models on extremes. For example, Humble Bundle has shown there are other ways.
You haven't used Humble Bundle lately have you? They increased their minimums on the bundle and increased their required cut. Now, did they do this because they are hurting for money or for greed? I don't know.
...And they aren't unreasonable when these things have been rendered non-rivalrous goods.
Tell me, what price should your parents have charged you for teaching you to tie your shoes? To cook? To clean? Get back to me when the cost of digital reproduction requires factories, and trucking fleets, and paper mills. Oh wait... It doesn't. It requires transliteration to the written word, document layout, and maybe a little marketing so the world knows it's there.
If the paper book can be delivered for $8.99, there is no excuse for the ebook to be $8.99 per reader en perpetuity. Even Thomas Jefferson bloody understood that concept 200 years ago. One who lights their own candle off of another's leaves the one who was lit off of none the worse. So to with knowledge. The owners of industrial printing presses are just terrified of the possibility of the dawn of their own irrelevance. So they dump what money they get in creating artificial information asymmetries to exploit tor profit. And therein lay the root of all evil.
Maybe this is not the topic you were going for but this triggers me because I've long wondered how to do pricing fairly in general. If you're a monopolist or in a highly competitive market, what strategy could you use regardless to arrive at a fair price? I think the answer is cost + a little bonus because nothing else really works. If I had to pay the value it brings me for everything in life... what are my glasses worth, half my salary? The work computer (as an IT person) is maybe three quarters of my salary? That already does not add up and I still haven't paid for the food I need or my office chair
The person who makes it knows the cost price and needs to set a price for money to work, I think. Which is not to say that donations can't work, you can always feel free to make an exception and give the author a good day, but it wouldn't work as a general payment model I don't think