I have periodically said “software has nothing to do with business” as a criticism of tech journalism that focuses on firms and corporate politics over tech itself, or that considers all software to be products or potential products, or that considers success to be defined primarily in terms of money. I get a lot of pushback, including from intelligent tech journalists who I feel should understand my criticisms, so I’d like to expand on my quip.
When I say ‘luckily software has nothing to do with business’, I do not mean that business is irrelevant to software in practice. What I mean is that software is uniquely positioned, compared to all other engineering, to be free of economies of scale: it is cheap to develop and has near zero cost of reproduction. Business has the capacity to be irrelevant to software without any radical changes to how business is run or software is developed in practice.
In other words, software development can be done outside a capitalist context to a much greater extent than material forms of tinkering. Coding is not an expensive hobby: only the free-time component applies. Even a fairly weak form of UBI could give a big boost to free software, because most available software (still) is not developed by businesses or for business purposes but as a hobby by hobbyists who expect nothing in exchange.
I am not claiming that software engineering for the money is somehow illegitimate. I consider the entire ‘work to live’ arrangement to be illegitimate. Software engineering, like writing, benefits more…
