Ask Slashdot: Should Commercial Software Prices Be Pegged To a Country's GDP?

Here's a bright idea from dryriver Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly? Most software makers in the U.S. and EU currently insist on charging the full U.S. or EU price in much poorer countries. "Rampant piracy" and "low sales" is often the result in these countries. Why not change this by charging lower software prices in less wealthy countries?
This presupposes the continuing existence of closed-source software businesses -- but is there a way to make that pricing more fair? Leave your best suggestions in the comments. should commercial software prices be pegged to a country's GDP?

Comments

Subject

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of the simple fact that doing this will move the problem. Instead of having piracy in those "poor" countries, you will now have resellers taking advantage of the low price and making a profit in the "rich" country.

Re:Subject

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Dryriver,

You present a most sensible idea and I'm sure there are other alternatives along the same basic idea -- which any human with a heart could devise if she/he gives the problem minimal consideration.

I commend you for seeing the problem from the right angle; notice, though, that many will think about the problem from the wrong P.O.V. -- e.g. like the AC above. And that's why nobody did ever come up with an idea to solve the piracy conundrum and still make possible for the poor guys to be honest.: because they don't care about that... they care about making money. Full stop.

And woe into you if you ever might suggest this is not enough! They'll say you are:

a. a communist;
b. an anarchist;
c. some variant of f4aggot;
d. Mother Theresa;
e. any other offense they can come up with now that they got the power.

But your idea is feasible, just like there are DVD regions and DRM restrictions (e.g. "sorry, Hooloo is not available in your country, thank you for your interest... don't call us, we'll call you"). Some even have done something in that direction... e.g. Windows 7 "Starter" version.

But the best way is really what someone already has posted: Linux.

Re: Subject

[Sid314]

That concern can be addressed by a simple term in the license about country of primary use or country where user lives etc. And if you're going to not follow the license agreement anyway, the price isn't going to stop you from going unlicensed

Re:Subject

[arth1]

You touch upon the problem why it won't work. It requires rigid regional DRM. And that's not a good long term solution.
There's no doubt in my mind that piracy has increased due to regional DRM, both for DVDs and entertainment software. If you can't get what you want legally while others can, that leads to uprising and war. Even if the war is just one person downloading pirated stuff.

Re:Subject

[Austerity Empowers]

Even beyond rigid DRM, there are two other reasons:

1) you create a situation where high GDP countries have much higher costs to operate (piracy in these places is harder and more likely to result in arrest), and as a result businesses sometimes become impossible to start due to investment factor. It makes us less able to adapt and try new things. This further sets the stage to enable us to continue to exploit labor price differences and exploit workers on both sides of the political border.

2) The vendor needs to recoup his costs (even if we ignore profit, which their investors never do), and we assume the price given to you is at least somewhat based upon development costs, then the low GDP countries aren't paying their way. They're relying on high GDP countries to fund this software so that low GDP countries can leech. I'm not sure anyone wants that particular kind of charity, we prefer it to be out in the open (and tax deductible)

DRM is just the mechanism hollywood came up to enable them to do exactly this.

Re:Subject

[jonwil]

The software developers can use their existing online activation and other copy protection measures to enforce region locks.

Anyone who works around it and defeats the region lock would probably just pirate anyway.

Re: Subject

[javaman235]

That's exactly right. Music sellers too could make so much more money if they let us put 50 cents or a quarter on certain songs, though that wouldn't buy it right away, after a period of time and statistic analysis of our purchases they could either call our bluff (we'd actually pay more) or sell it to us for that price. They would make so much more money that way at no cost, by identifying the songs that we would buy, just not for $1.29. This kind of thing should apply to all IP matters, including medicines. If the medicine cost is covering R&D rather than production, they should have it available to the third world at lower quality or whatever, (so it can't be resold to US) rather than just letting people die.

Re:Subject

[guruevi]

DVDs are cheap enough and have plenty of free or low cost alternatives (whether pirate copies, BitTorrent or Netflix) that it's not worth importing.

Look at medicine (into the US), agricultural machinery, old encryption laws (56 vs 128 bits) etc as well as barriers in countries like Iran, Cuba and N Korea for a better comparison on how regional cost differences impact imports and why it doesn't make a difference to large corporations.

Whether you're in the US or Uganda, as a corporation or government you can afford Microsoft or Cisco and the individual that can barely afford it won't pay for it regardless of the cost.

Re:Subject

[wvmarle]

Yay! More of our beloved DRM!

Re:Subject

[turning in circles]

When it comes to pharmaceuticals, no one has a problem with high prices in the US and regulations lowering the prices of the same drugs in other countries. I understand IP is different in that there's no physical pill, but the overseas pharmacies are doing quite well. So if it could work for pharmaceuticals, it should be able to work for software.

For example, University in Country X gets software for low price, and will lease it to students in Country X, while assuring publisher that it can control it is giving it only to students in country X.

Re:Subject

[ShanghaiBill]

It is a dumb idea. Just because someone lives in a poor country doesn't mean they are poor. Just because someone lives in a rich country doesn't mean they are rich. It would be more reasonable to consider the income of each person individually, and instead of doing it for a superfluous item like software, it is much more important to do it for critical items like food. I hereby propose that everyone should be required to bring a notarized copy of their tax returns to the grocery store, so Safeway knows how much to charge for the milk.

Re:Subject

[xlsior]

One way around that without rigid DRM is have several different language versions with different pricing. People in the US typically wouldn't buy the Greek version even though it may be cheaper than English. (of course the English version would have global appeal, so that would preclude a low-cost English language version)

Re:Subject

[arth1]

Tax returns only show how much legal income someone had 12-24 months ago. They're a very bad basis for making decisions like aid or progressive charges.
And the POTUS would get no milk.

Re:Subject

[DavidRawling]

So I can't buy something while on holiday in the US, and install on my PC at home in Australia? What if I buy something and move countries? What version do I buy if I live in Australia, travel to the US (and need to use the software there) and take a contract in the Ukraine? Region locks suck, may not be legally enforceable in some countries such as Australia - ACCC Copyright fact sheet used to say this about DVDs, emphasis mine:

An access control TPM specifically excludes TPMs which control geographic market segmentation. This means that consumers will be able to circumvent the region coding TPMs on legitimate DVDs purchased overseas. It also allows for the continued availability of region-free DVD players.

They also suck for users.

But then I guess that's the holy triumvirate, isn't it? Trying to force people to re-buy the same thing multiple times?

Re:Subject

[Sique]

Interestingly though, European countries believe, they are paying the high drug prices to subsidize them for other countries. Which points to a simple fact: You aren't subsidizing drugs for other countries at all. If selling a drug in a country would turn in no profit for a pharmaceutical company, they wouldn't sell it there. You are subsidizing nil. If drug prices are high in your country, then you as the one who finally pays the bill for the drug, have not much negotiating power over drug prices, because a cartel of insurers, pharmaceutical companies and health care provider are setting the prices by haggling between each other.

For some reason, the U.S. recently voted someone into office who promised to dismantle any attempt to break into this cartel.

Re:Subject

[fph il quozientatore]

So, apart from a meaningless renormalization that is only a display issue, everyone makes the same amount of money. Because they can buy the same amount of things, right? Congratulations, you have just invented communism.

Re:Subject

[Bert64]

Region coding is easily and commonly bypassed...
The only reason it's not more common with DVDs is because shipping physical media around the world is more expensive and slower than sending digital files across the internet, so all the pirate DVDs on sale in any given location were probably downloaded and burned locally.

In fact, region coding encourages piracy because there are many titles that are not available in all regions, so people in those regions who would have bought are faced with the choice of piracy or not watching the movie at all.

Also region coding basically is a form of price control, and it doesn't work.

Re:Subject

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem I have with such arguments for strong IP laws is that they fall flat when you look at the truth of it.

We constantly hear about how tech, pharmaceuticals, and entertainment need strong IP laws otherwise they'll simply cease to exist, but given the amount of multi-millionaires and billionaires these industries produce, coupled with the billions in profits their industries churn out each year, it's incredibly clear that there's plenty of room for a loosening of IP laws (and hence a market driven lowering of prices) whilst still allowing them to rake in billions (just slightly less billions).

The idea that current IP laws are necessary for businesses to survive, thrive, and innovate is nonsense. If a big pharma company could only make $1bn a year, instead of $2bn, because of reduced patent terms, it'd still do what it does. $1bn is still ample incentive to get on and do the job.

I think software of all industries is one of the industries where strong IP laws are least necessary, and I say this as a developer. The barrier to entry to start your own business is non-existent beyond having a computer in the vast majority of cases. I've done exactly this, but all software I've produced and sold off my own back I've written in my spare time whilst continuing to work full time. "I can't get investors!" just isn't an excuse, and besides, they ask for such a disproportionately large share of the pie to what they're offering you early on citing the increased risk of a young startup that you'd be a fool to pull them in anyway unless there's absolutely no other way. Most people who fail at this are those who insist they have to quit their jobs to do it, and so have no income source, and so declare that they desperately need investors.

I've even seen people here whine about piracy because they couldn't make a living selling some game they produced having quit their full time job - the game in question looked fucking awful, and they decided they had a god given right to make money off it and declared piracy the fault, demanding strong IP laws. It's nonsense, if you produce shite, and quit your job, then have no income, you only have yourself to blame. Natural selection never went away just because we have running water, and central heating, you still have to survive in the world, it's not up to the world to make sure you survive no matter how entitled you are or what stupid decisions you make. Humanity tries it's best, but there are necessarily limits.

Re:Subject

[Kiuas]

Overseas pharmacies ignore IP protected drugs by using a loop hole in the international trade pacts that allow country claiming a national medical emergency and then go on to create their own generic copies.

You mean overseas countries like the Netherlands, Canada and UK not to mention all the other European countries are 'ignoring trade pacts' with the US? Huh?

Yes, unlicensed manufacturing is going on in places like India, but the fact of the matter is that the drug companies are charging insane amounts of extra in the US because they can. After all, they seek to make profit, so to them, the price is set carefully to the point that allows them to extract the most profit out of any given economy. The pharmaceutical industry is in a position in which people often have to buy their products or they will die. This is what allows them to ask prices that are way beyond what their actual R & D costs are. Look at the chart from this article outlining the costs and profits of the largest drug manufacturers. All of them spend more money on marketing than R & D and all if them have large margins, with Pfizer making as much as 43 % proft. These numbers are unheard of in any other industry, and they're solely the result of the american medical system's private nature which robs hospitals and states of effective ways to buy drugs cheaper. Instead of the Federal government or a state buying drugs in bulk, each private hospital chain has to buy them separately. This, combined with the fact that insured individuals don't really care how much the price is as long as it's covered by their insurance is what's put the US so far behind other developed nations in drig-polices and allowed the pharmaceutical industry to become the most profitable industry in the US.

There's no way for example European economies to 'force' these companies to sell to us at a loss. The prices they get selling their drugs to us are still profitable to them, butt because most non-US economies use differing forms of collective bargaining among other sensible policies, we're able to negotiate the prices down. A lot. The common counter-argument to this is that if the US started limiting drug companies' abilities to make as much profit as they currently do, they'd stop R & D and we'd run out of new drugs, but this is false. All of the companies can afford to sell the drugs much cheaper than they currently are being sold in the US and still make solid profit.

Re:Subject

[rtb61]

If closed source proprietary software is too expensive, privacy invasive, badly supported, unreliable or insecure and it's use represent an unsound economic burden on a country, simply use and work on the free open source version of it. Not only will you save money but you will also develop computer sciences in your own country, so double plus benefit. It's the old give a man a fish or in this case selling it to them versus teaching them how to fish.

Re:Subject

[I75BJC]

Regrettably, in the case of the Epi-Pen refutes every thing that you have written and implied. During the Obama Regime, his cronies at the head of the Epi-Pen's manufacturer played the USA Federal Governments health regulatory, care, and insurance systems to the detriment of those allergy sufferers who needed to carry an Epi-Pen (for life-threatening situations that do occur regularly). As reported by the Main Stream Media, this went on for years and only as Obama was approaching the end of his reign, did the situation begin to change. For example, while the Epi-Pen is a name brand drug, the manufacturer listed the drug as a "generic" so that the Government would pay more for the drug – 2 different Government agencies failed to co-ordinate and permitted the Epi-Pen travesty occur. Also, the Government's non-competitive regulations (patents, etc.) did not permit another manufacturers to produce truly "generic" alternatives. In the last days of the Obama regime, an alternative has been announced but for years the cronies ran wild and the people a high price for a simple drug.

Re:Subject

[rickb928]

No one buys pharmaceuticals for the pills, or sprays, or powders, ointments, whatever the physical product is. They buy and use them for the effects. The effects. The utility. Improved health, improved performance, whatever.

And no one buys software for the physical media, or downloaded data, the bits. They buy software for the effect. The utility, results.

This is a great fallacy with IP, trying to categorize it as somehow different form all other products. It is just another product, deserving of the same protections, but no more. Governable by the same methods as other products. Even some patented seeds risk reproduction, even accidentally, and so the IP involved being used and benefit gained by those who somehow (accidentally even?) are able to propagate and continue deriving value without purchasing new seed.

As the state often does, a thing is not regulated until it is practical for people to do it. then, all of a sudden, it becomes a problem to be solved. Vinyl records->reel-t-reel tape was not a big deal, more trouble than the masses would engage in. Vinyl->cassette, that was much easier, and boom, taxes. CDs, digital media, needed copy protection because it became trivial to copy them. Pharmaceuticals are still hard to copy, though many are based on plants etc found in nature, and those, surprise, are often heavily regulated. Software, easily duplicated both in distribution and design, is getting special treatment that is not needed. If the problem is that anonymity makes enforcement difficult or impossible, this has always been a problem.

IP is not different from pharmaceuticals. No, it is not.

Re:Subject

[houghi]

You make it sound as if that is a bad idea.

Re:Subject

[Cederic]

software of all industries is one of the industries where strong IP laws are least necessary

You'd probably change your mind if every piece of software you wrote was copied by someone else and sold using a marketing budget you can't afford with none of the revenue coming to you.

The only thing preventing that from happening are the strong IP laws on software.

Re: Subject

[Cederic]

I buy my music from Ukraine, for 10c/song.

Globalisation, it has to work for people as well as corporations.

Re:Subject

[OhPlz]

Good luck getting the alternative if you have prescription insurance. I've been fighting with my insurer for over a week trying to get an "epinephrine auto-injector" that is generic and not the far more expensive brand name Epi-Pen. It's insane. The insurer keeps denying that one exists even though they provided them last year. To get the generic now we have to go through a non-formulary authorization process which so far has failed.

Re:Subject

[amicusNYCL]

When it comes to pharmaceuticals, no one has a problem with high prices in the US and regulations lowering the prices of the same drugs in other countries.

Oh really, no one has a problem with that? There are many drugs that are dozens or hundreds of times more expensive in the US than in other countries, and that is definitely a problem for anyone in the US who has a hard time paying for medicine. If you have Hepatitis C, there's good news - now you can get it cleared up in a matter of months. And it's only going to cost $94,500 to do that. That's only $1,125 per pill. Although if you fly to the EU, you can get it for less than 50,000 Euros. Or you can go to India and get it for $900 total.

But, don't worry, because here in the US the manufacturers of the drug say that they don't think that the cost should keep people from getting treatment (I mean, they say that right on their website). So they have a coupon program where you'll only pay $5, but of course that only covers 25% of the total program, so it will at least save you around $20k so that you're only spending around $75k to get the medicine. What a bargain. Of course, you can't be on Medicare to be eligible for that discount, or have any insurance that will reimburse you for the cost of a drug. Any many other requirements.

But hey, is $32,000 or so per 28-pill bottle really too much to live without Hep C? Because, if it is, then maybe just go to India and pay less for the medicine than it took you to travel there. They spent around $140 million to advertise that drug to consumers, so they've got to make that money back, you know? And since only the United States and New Zealand allow drug companies to advertise direct to consumers, that's where they spend the money and that's where they need to get it back.

There are a lot of problems with this system. A major one is the insurance system in the US, but it's not the only one. The US could look to a lot of other countries for examples of legislation to reduce drug prices, because it is obviously possible. But saying that no one has a problem with this system is a little off the mark.

Re: Subject

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

What a thoroughly bigoted, ridiculous statement.

Re:Subject

[nasch]

This is a great fallacy with IP, trying to categorize it as somehow different form all other products.

It's not different from all other products, but it is different from medicine and many other products in that it's non-excludable and non-rivalrous. That doesn't mean the government needs to take special measures to protect it, but it does change things.

Re:Subject

[nasch]

The only way those IP laws will help you is if you successfully sue your competitor (and the next competitor who tries it, and the next...). And if you think marketing is expensive, try lawsuits.

Re: Subject

[rickb928]

Non-rivalrous? Hmm. Not sure I agree.

Re: Subject

[nasch]

A good is considered non-rivalrous or non-rival if, for any level of production, the cost of providing it to a marginal (additional) individual is zero.

You could quibble about companies being charged for internet service by the megabyte or something like that, but in any meaningful sense the cost of providing another copy of a digital good is essentially zero. They're about as non-rivalrous as anything can get.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: Subject

[rickb928]

No, successive downloading of digital goods is not without cost. Servers must be maintained and connections as well. Security is an expense.

Such fallacies. Not thinking it through comes to this...

Re:Subject

[piojo]

Is copyright considered an IP law? Because if it's not, software development doesn't need IP law. You don't need a patent to stop someone from ripping off your project.

Re:Subject

[Cederic]

Yes, it generally is.

Re: Subject

[nasch]

No, successive downloading of digital goods is not without cost. Servers must be maintained and connections as well. Security is an expense.

Those are fixed costs that are incurred whether there are zero downloads or 10,000. Rivalry is about marginal costs. In fact the definition I quoted even has the word "marginal" in it. If you don't know the difference between fixed and marginal costs, you should look that up because you are not going to understand rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods without understanding that first.

Re: Subject

[rickb928]

I understood. You redefined it as 'essentially without cost', which isn't quite right.

And this example is 'essentially fixed costs' for most situations, as both very small and very large distribution models have disproportionate costs per download. Very large providers may have to use CDNs, negotiated peer access, and face greater security risks. Smaller providers may have higher unit costs due to very small scale.

The perception that digital goods are 'essentially without costs' is a fallacy, still, and one that is both popular and convenient. Simplistic defence of that perception isn't entirely honest, and doesn't serve to fully understand the industry.

Re: Subject

[nasch]

If it costs more to serve a million downloads a month than it does one because you need a CDN or a bigger pipe or whatever, that isn't a marginal cost, it's still a fixed cost. A marginal cost is how much it costs to serve ONE additional unit. For a physical product, if you need a bigger truck because you're shipping more units, that truck is not a marginal cost. If you need to use another box to ship another unit, that box is a marginal cost, because it's a cost associated with a single additional sale.

Digital goods are not without costs. But they are very close to without marginal costs.

Re: Subject

[rickb928]

'very close' is the point I was making.

And is the unit of measure a single download, or a thousand, of for hugely popular items literally millions?

If your perspective is that the pricing is to be challenged, I expect you to define costs as largely fixed and minimal. If you examine the 'production' effort, you can readily find that costs scale with sales. For digital goods, this is mostly hugely nonlinear. And so it's hard to accept.

Ps- we are also blithely giving market forces and monopolistic market share a pass. Microsoft Office is a virtual monopoly. Candy Crush is a phenomenal but brief success. Both have huge total distribution costs, but marginal costs seem low. One finances continued development and less profitable projects, the other is a windfall...

Re: Subject

[nasch]

'very close' is the point I was making.

I acknowledged that. It is possible internet service is by the byte, in which case there is some extremely small marginal cost.

And is the unit of measure a single download, or a thousand, of for hugely popular items literally millions?

When talking marginal cost, it's a single download.

If your perspective is that the pricing is to be challenged, I expect you to define costs as largely fixed and minimal.

I'm not looking to challenge anyone's pricing, just describing the nature of the product.

If you examine the 'production' effort, you can readily find that costs scale with sales. For digital goods, this is mostly hugely nonlinear. And so it's hard to accept.

If you can find a cost that goes up when one additional person downloads a book or song or app (other than that tiny bandwidth charge) then that would be evidence that the good is rivalrous. But I haven't seen that yet.

Ps- we are also blithely giving market forces and monopolistic market share a pass.

If by giving them a pass you mean not discussing them, yes. There's lots of stuff we're not discussing.

Microsoft Office is a virtual monopoly. Candy Crush is a phenomenal but brief success. Both have huge total distribution costs, but marginal costs seem low. One finances continued development and less profitable projects, the other is a windfall...

I'm not sure what your point is. That fixed costs matter? That monopolies affect markets? Something else?

Re:Subject

[turning in circles]

Sorry, you are quite correct. Many people have a problem with the high prices of pharmaceuticals in the US. The point I was trying to make was that Pharma/governments have figured out how to differentially price the same product in different countries and to a first approximation, make that differential pricing stick. This is what the subject was about, is it possible to do it, so I gave an example where it's done.

Another example, closer to the point, is people working for a university: we all get much software (and access to otherwise paywalled websites) free under the University's site license. So, differential pricing of software is in fact operating in the US already in a way that software producers don't mind. Imagine a world where your employer provides you not only healthcare, but also software for personal use . . .

Multinationals..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why yes.... my multinational corporation will be happy to purchase 300000 user licenses from our 1 person office in your favorite poor country.

Already like that

[rmdingler]

The reason folks from the US shop in Mexico for prescription drugs and animal vaccines is because this phenomenon already exists.

Re:Already like that

[PolygamousRanchKid]

It seems that Apple is already doing this, as well. Apple recently raised the prices in the UK by 25%, because of the Brexit.

So this is good news for the British Empire, as their GDP must have grown by 25% since the Brexit!

Economics pundits claim this is the result of the UK rejecting the EU mandated breakfast, consisting of a stale croissant and a thimble full of muddy coffee. The Full English Brexit now consists of baked beans and tea. Whitehall minstrels are planning for extensions including a slap-up fry-up.

Re:Already like that

[mattwarden]

This is a different issue. That price change is due to the GBPUSD exchange rate.

Re:Already like that

[gnasher719]

It seems that Apple is already doing this, as well. Apple recently raised the prices in the UK by 25%, because of the Brexit.

Looks like you are either stupid or a liar. The reason isn't Brexit. The reason is the awful exchange rate, which meant that for six months I as a developer had 20% less in my pocket if someone bought my app on the UK store, compared to someone buying it on the US store. This has changed now, so I will have quite exactly the same amount of money in my pocket, whether the customer is in the US or the UK.

Re:Already like that

[jabuzz]

And the awful exchange rate is directly caused by the vote in the referendum to leave the EU dipshit.

Re:Already like that

[thegarbz]

Nope that has nothing to do with GDP or affordability. It has everything to do with regulation and health care systems. An easy counter example: Luxembourg. Twice the GDP per capita of the USA. Much higher cost of living. Higher average income. Very similar discretionary income per household, but many drugs cost a fraction there of the USA equivalent.

Same stories with other countries.

Re:Already like that

[Cederic]

No, that awful exchange rate was long overdue - the pound had been overvalued for months, as multiple economists and publications had highlighted long before the EU referendum.

Brexit: Causing more fake fucking news than even Donald and Hillary.

Grey market.

[HornWumpus]

Back in the day, I could get grey market Novell packages for less than the local Netmare distributor's wholesale price.

The world is a global market. You can get a genuine Chinese Fluke DMM for the price of a cheapy. They are blowing their peckers off to serve a market that mostly ignores brands in any case.

Re:Grey market.

[AmiMoJo]

Chinese Fluke meters are actually a good example of where this works. The DRM is that everything is labelled in Chinese and most westerners don't speak it, there is no English support (warranty, spares etc) and that they clamp down hard on any distributors trying to import them to the west. Meanwhile they get a slice of the vast Chinese market that would otherwise go to competitors.

Fluke meters are overpriced in the west. Unlike software though it's harder to import the Chinese models, so they can get away with it.

Re:Grey market.

[HornWumpus]

You can find chinese Fluke meters on ebay and Amazon.

You need instructions to use a DMM? How much bench time do you have?

The real problem is the meters aren't really any better than the good cheapies.

Re:Grey market.

[Areyoukiddingme]

The real problem is the meters aren't really any better than the good cheapies.

How could they be? The calibrated resistors they depend on are made in the same Chinese factory as the ones in the good cheapies, and there is no US manufacturer at all.

Microsoft does

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows pricing is very different in China, for example (rampant piracy).

Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds more fair when you say charge less in poorer countries. However when you turn it around, it is gouge the people in less poor countries.

Kind of like when a tax preparer takes a percentage cut. Why should they get paid more from someone who is getting more back, for essentially the same work?

Re: Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[__aaclcg7560]

Same for prescription drugs - in those cases, the gov'ts negotiate the rates or threaten to make generic or just allow rampant piracy.

For what my late father paid for a one-month supply of his maintenance drugs in the U.S. he got a six-month supply from India. The only problem with buying from India is that the package sits in New York customs warehouse for a month before transferring to the USPS for final delivery.

Re:Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[Ungrounded Lightning]

It sounds more fair when you say charge less in poorer countries. However when you turn it around, it is gouge the people in less poor countries.

Especially given that GDP is not evenly distributed among the population. The bulk of the added revenue from technology driven productivity improvements (at least in the US) has gone to the denizens of the C suites and the government, not to the workers. GDP has soared while real-inflation adjusted after-tax income has stagnated or dropped for decades.

That's much of why a nuclear family in the '50s got along fine on a single income and a two-parent family now involves both parents working and the kids in child care, and the bulk of kids are in "non-traditional" family arrangements and/or on some form of public assistance.

So "gouge the developed world's middle class" is indeed what such a GDP-based scheme would accomplish.

Re:Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[Nutria]

That's much of why a nuclear family in the '50s got along fine on a single income and a two-parent family now involves both parents working and the kids in child care,

Of course, the nuclear family of the 1950s had:
a 1200 (not 2200) sqft house,
formica (not granite) counters,
stainless steel appliances,
automatic dishwasher,
automatic dryer,
*might* have had a TV (not a 54" LCD),
car without multiple built-in DVD player, infotainment center, ABS brakes, half a dozen air bags, computer controlled *everything*, 2000W stereos,
computers,
smartphones,
game consoles,
etc,
etc,
ad nauseum.

Re: Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[__aaclcg7560]

Many people worry more about quality control with Indian pharmaceuticals.

My father had no problems with the drugs he ordered from India every six months for five years.

Re:Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[hambone142]

Give the SW to low GDP countries for cheap. Then watch the US and the EU outsource jobs to the low GDP countries because they're so inexpensive.

Re:Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[Spy Handler]

Nuclear family of the 1950s usually started when the parents were in their 20's. Dad working a factory job, stay-at-home mom, living in a 1200 square foot house with formica countertops.

In 2016 millenials in their 20s are either living in the basement of their parents' 2200 square foot house or doubling/tripling up in an apartment with roommates. Yes they have cheap electronics and granite countertops in their parents house or their apartment, but are they really doing better than their 1950s counterparts?

Re:Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[swb]

I think you undersell how people lived in the 1950s.

I live in a house built in 1954 and it was originally about 1800 finished square feet with 3 bedrooms. Switching counter tops to Formica was probably an upgrade over previous choices which probably had been wood or linoleum. I don't think automatic dishwashers were that widespread until the 1960s or later.

But I think they would have had a washing machine, possibly a dryer, almost certainly a TV and a couple of radios.

I think in many ways the lifestyle of a 1955 family probably felt extremely futuristic to them -- for a lot of them, I bet they had first hand experience with houses without central heating, wood cooking stoves, using an outhouse, no automatic hot water heater.

The other high tech stuff nobody had, either, so they weren't exactly missing it.

Re:Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[tsqr]

My early childhood was in the 1950s, in a blue-collar neighborhood in Southern California.

Of course, the nuclear family of the 1950s had: a 1200 (not 2200) sqft house, formica (not granite) counters,

We had ceramic tile counters, which were quite common at the time.

stainless steel appliances,

Really? Almost everyone I knew had white enamel, and the ones that didn't, had yellow, pink, or turquoise. Blecch.

automatic dishwasher,

Only well-off people had dishwashers in the 50s. They became common in the late 60s.

automatic dryer,

LOL. We had a washing machine with a wringer on top. The "dryer" was a clothesline in the back yard. I remember how happy my mother was when she finally got a real automatic washer with a (gasp) spin cycle.

*might* have had a TV (not a 54" LCD),

Yep. A 10" Admiral console tv with chronic vertical sync problems; perfect for watching George Putnam's evening news broadcasts. Replaced circa 1957 with a 17" one. My parents finally got a color tv in 1966.

car without multiple built-in DVD player, infotainment center, ABS brakes, half a dozen air bags, computer controlled *everything*, 2000W stereos, computers, smartphones, game consoles, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

Re:Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[Nutria]

I made the mistake of forgetting to write that they did not have stainless steel, iPhones, etc, etc.

Sorry.

Re:Gouge the middle class to make them poor

[ChrisMaple]

Representative starter houses for families in the 1950s are the Levittown houses: about 700 square feet. Tiny bedrooms, a living room not big enough to swing a cat in.

Because people can travel?

[CastrTroy]

What's to stop people from going to Venezuela and buying 10 copies of Final Cut Pro and bringing it back to the US? Unless you are suggesting that they start region locking software, controlling which country you can use software in depending on where you bought it.

Re:Because people can travel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you buy even one copy of Final Cut Pro?

Re:Because people can travel?

[omnichad]

What's to stop people from going to Venezuela and buying 10 copies of Final Cut Pro and bringing it back to the US?

The fact that it's only sold in the App store now?

Beside that point, too much of this reselling will eventually raise the GDP of that country - solving the problem.

Re:Because people can travel?

[fermion]

This would require massive amounts of additional DRM to insure the software was running in the correct region. Think of DVD players, and the reason I stopped buying DVDs.

For software this would be catastrophic. For anyone who travels software that works on one country and not another will be useless.

Re:Because people can travel?

[No Longer an AC]

This is the problem. I've seen people on /. complain about the price of textbooks and how they could buy them much cheaper in Asia for example.

I've got 2 copies of K&R's The C Programming Language. One of them is the usual paperback most of us probably have somewhere on our bookshelves and the other is....Chinese I guess. I mean it's in English just like the other, but it's a hard-cover edition and the first few pages have Chinese characters on them. (It's actually a little red book - also little read, lol).

No seriously it's little and it's red. I can't remember how I acquired it, but I'm sure there is a Chinese graduate of my alma mater that is missing his little red book.

Re:Because people can travel?

[thegarbz]

What's to stop people from going to Venezuela and buying 10 copies of Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro by its own design and feature set defends itself against people going to such lengths to obtain copies of it.

Re:Because people can travel?

[mjwx]

What's to stop people from going to Venezuela and buying 10 copies of Final Cut Pro and bringing it back to the US? Unless you are suggesting that they start region locking software, controlling which country you can use software in depending on where you bought it.

The fact that they will be able to do it online. Seriously, almost all software is digital download these days, only the purchase needs to go via Venezuela (and possibly the activation, but a /.er should know how to handle that).

There was once a time right up until the early 00's where it was cheaper to fly from Perth, Western Australia to Los Angeles to buy 5 copies of Creative Suite than it was to buy it locally including flights, 2 nights accommodations and the average wage of an Australian for a full working week.

After the mid 00's that kind of activity was made redundant by the internet and couldn't be stopped by the fact the Govt made it legal to buy grey imports.

Re:Because people can travel?

[slew]

What's to stop people from going to Venezuela and buying 10 copies of Final Cut Pro and bringing it back to the US? Unless you are suggesting that they start region locking software, controlling which country you can use software in depending on where you bought it.

Why would you go to Venezuela to buy anything? Even if you could find a flight...

Perhaps you should think about using Cuba as your example communist country in the future... Oh wait, you can't buy Final Cut Pro there either because of the US boycott, Ecuador anyone?

Re:Because people can travel?

[bmo]

>Ecuador anyone?

It would actually be worth it to go to Ecuador. Quito is a nice city.

You also don't even need to visit a money changer or bank to buy your breakfast - US Dollar is the official currency.

--
BMO

Pricing of goods

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with you? Those who produce can ask what they like for what they produce. If it isn't worth it people won't buy. Whether it is worth it or not, there will always be those that will steal what is produced. 'Fair' is where you go to sell your pig, not the means by which you set the price.

Re:Pricing of goods

[AmiMoJo]

Sure, but back in the real world software piracy isn't theft, carries a relatively low chance of being caught and low penalties if you are, and the fact that some bit of software is either massively unaffordable or costs half as much in some other country tends to make people feel morally justified in copying it.

This is the economic reality that companies have to deal with. If Michael Bay decides that Transformers 5 is such a masterpiece it deserves a $100 pricetag, people will just say "I would never buy that anyway, might as well pirate it".

Re:Pricing of goods

[thegarbz]

What is wrong with you?

Nothing's wrong with him. He is proposing the very system you are asking for. A perfect market where a good is worth exactly what each individual person would bear, not what the market itself would. This maximises profits for the vendor.

They optimize it clearly

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

If you allow lower prices for India and China, what's to stop companies from buying the software in those countries and use it in USA? These companies use all the tax loopholes to move their profits to overseas subsidiaries. They know their customers will create subsidiaries in India and turn around and buy services from the subsidiary and use it in USA. The snakes know the legs of snakes, as the old Tamil proverb goes.

Re:They optimize it clearly

[Anonymous Coward]

If you allow lower prices for India and China, what's to stop companies from buying the software in those countries and use it in USA?

Because it would be illegal, duh!
Problems solved, once and for all.

captcha: harping

Re:They optimize it clearly

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple... Sell keys that are only usable in China/India? Region Locking has been a thing that existed for a LONG time. Especially now with OSes that have geolocation built in.

Re:They optimize it clearly

[gl4ss]

haha.

it doesn't actually work.

thats why vpn biz is such a booming industry now.. because companies are actually trying to pull this thing off already.

they've been trying to do this exact thing with books, with software, with movies & etc for a long ass time already now.

the askslashdot is from a bizarro world. besides, it's already cheaper in poorer countries as they in general don't have VAT/sales tax anyways. basically this makes everything on steam 7-14% cheaper in any 3rd world country.

Re:They optimize it clearly

[fph il quozientatore]

This is basically what has been happening for years with "international editions" of university textbooks.

Ummm, No

[JWW]

They should always use Open Source and just follow the GPL.... ;-)

Re:Ummm, No

[tepples]

If a nontrivial video game is released under a free software license on day one, how might its development be funded?

Re:Ummm, No

[Oligonicella]

I do believe his winky eye emoti made clear he was being facetious.

Re:Ummm, No

[Desler]

People don't pay for support of a game.

Re:Ummm, No

[tepples]

They might for an MMO, but not for a single-player or offline multiplayer game.

Re:Ummm, No

[tepples]

The open-source world obviously won't get you any of "the games you see advertised in stores." They have plenty of others though.

Does free software have any of the games that e-sports leagues have chosen to play? I would think that all other things being equal, e-sports would flock to free software, as use of a game composed of free software and free assets avoids having to negotiate public performance rights for streaming matches. But there must be something else stopping notable e-sports leagues from choosing free software.

You can't have it both ways

[El Cubano]

Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly? Most software makers in the U.S. and EU currently insist on charging the full U.S. or EU price in much poorer countries. "Rampant piracy" and "low sales" is often the result in these countries. Why not change this by charging lower software prices in less wealthy countries?

Because if you want to make cheap goods and flood my market indiscriminately and then call me a protectionist and accuse me of impeding free trade for creating a level playing field, then I should be allowed to freely (as in, I am free to do as I please) sell my software at whatever price I like in your country. That is, if I can't have a level playing field, then neither should you. After all, it's only fair.

Re:You can't have it both ways

[djinn6]

I should be allowed to freely sell my software at whatever price I like in your country.

I think you missed the part where people in those countries simply pirate your software.

A problem without a good solution.

[Zitchas]

There isn't really a good solution to this.

If everyone has the same price, then people in poor countries are likely to pirate.

If prices are adjusted so that it is expensive in rich countries and cheap in poor countries, then everyone is going to buy copies in the poor country, one way or another (either via resellers, establishing subsidiaries there, etc)

And if one region locks the software, then that makes people unhappy because they bought the product and want to be able to use it world wide. And it is hard to geolock computers, anyway.

I think just one price and have it constant everywhere is the best option. At least then you don't end up with situations like having everything super expensive in Australia just because.

If they dropped the prices in one poor country, everyone else will complain about "if you can afford to sell if for X in country Y, you must be ripping us off selling it for Z here."

Probably the best strategy is just to have one constant price, let the people in the poor countries pirate, and establish some kind of "pirate redemption" system targeting those areas to get people to spend some small amount to "upgrade" to a legit version. Then set that amount to the reduced amount one would have charged in the poor country in the first place.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think keeping the pricing constant per country is a good solution. So, 99 dollars in the US, 99 bolivars in Venezuela.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Stewie241]

And 99 Yen in Japan ($0.87 USD)? And 99 Pesos in Mexico ($4.62 USD)? And 99 Rubles in Russia? ($1.65 USD)

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[rubycodez]

no good solution for this article's problem? free and open source software!

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[ls671]

yeah I think that's what he means; and 99 British pounds (122 USD) and 99 euros (106 USD) and 99 bitcoins (91,520.00 USD) etc..

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[guruevi]

Or give away the software for free and sell support regionally if you want fairness that's the best way, your cost won't affect local economies as heavily and users will be able to afford training on your product for free so the software will be self-marketing.

Obviously you need to then compete on the quality of your software instead of lock-in and inertia.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[tepples]

Unless you're Red Hat and can sell support contracts, or unless you're Google and you can use it to prop up your ad platform and app store, where's the money in developing free software? Case in point: What's the "free and open source" counterpart to, say, Animal Crossing or Smash Bros.?

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Oligonicella]

So basically, fuck small, competent developers who provide products that don't require much if any support services?

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[DraconPern]

My solution was to price my service by currency.  So if a US customer really wants to get a cheaper price, they can buy it in EUR.  Of course then they'll have to explain to management why their 'quote' changes from week to week because of exchange rates.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Kjella]

There isn't really a good solution to this. If everyone has the same price, then people in poor countries are likely to pirate.

And...? People who can't afford a Rolex are more likely to steal a Rolex too, is that a problem you should solve by adjusting the price? The flip side of "lowering prices for poor people" is "gouging wealthy people for being rich". We generally hate companies trying to size up our wallet to see just much they can fleece us for. Isn't that what we'd be asking companies to do? I want to be able to go on Amazon or eBay and get the best product to the best price anyone will offer. That's how capitalism, competition, supply and demand and voting with your wallet is supposed to work. Companies shop around for labor, consumers shop around for products and services. And maybe that's not working out so well for everybody, but letting them put region locks on things to screw us while they continue to shop around the whole world is worse than nothing.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Solandri]

There isn't really a good solution to this.

Yes there is. It's staring everyone in the face but they don't want to acknowledge it because it amounts to self-sacrifice and tough love. The solution is to help the third world country modernize so their GDP per capita increases until it's roughly on par with developed nations. Then they will be able to afford the software. That's what we were doing with globalization (shifting some developed world jobs to third world countries). But enough people in developed countries got pissed off with "their" jobs going overseas that they've elected nationalist leaders to stop it.

Any other work-around to this problem simply delays the third world country being able to modernize. If they charge a lower price for the software in that country (ignoring the issue of people in developed countries buying it cheaper in the third world country), then that lessens upward pressure on local wages. People there are able to afford the software, so they're less likely to ask for / demand higher wages so they can buy the software (they'll just pirate it instead). Which slows down the rate at which the country's GDP per capita increases.

If you want to help software users in poor countries, the best way to do it is by helping them modernize and grow their economy. Doing them "favors" like giving them cheaper software, or food aid, or charity medical care just hurts them in the long run. (Food aid lowers the value of natively grown crops, making it harder for farmers to earn money to improve their crop yields. Medical charity decreases mortality rate and encourages the population to grow more than the native food production can support, making them even more reliant on foreign food aid. The best way is to help them grow their economy so their own farmers can produce enough crops to feed themselves. And for their own citizens to become doctors so they can open up native hospitals.)

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer is: Islamic Software Pricing! The vendor takes a cut form the business of the client, as a form of investment.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[jabuzz]

The difference is that stamping out an additional Rolex costs a lot of $$$. Stamping out a new copy of a piece of software that is most downloaded these days costs well somewhere very close to zero.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Plumpaquatsch]

So basically, fuck all developers that don't write trivial programs.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[AmiMoJo]

If the open source application helps you operate your business, and you saved money by using open source code rather than starting from scratch, then you can make money from developing free software. Look at Apple and Webkit, or Panasonic and NetBSD.

Games are different because their only utility is as entertainment, and few businesses can derive any benefit from that.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[SylvesterTheCat]

...then perhaps it really isn't a problem.

"If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact - not to be solved, but to be coped with over time."
- Shimon Peres

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

You can save money building on OSS. Where is the benefit to opening it up in the first place?

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I want to be able to go on Amazon or eBay and get the best product to the best price anyone will offer. That's how capitalism, competition, supply and demand and voting with your wallet is supposed to work

I'm not aware of anything in the academic descriptions of capitalism, competition, supply and demand or "voting with your wallet" that in any way implies you'll be able to go to Amazon/eBay and get the best product at the best price. In fact, I can point to numerous academic theories that point in quite the opposite direction.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[AmiMoJo]

Some licences require you to open your code if it uses other open code. Opening it to also allows other developers to improve it for free.

Re:A problem without a good solution.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The first point is only true if you're building on OSS. In that case, you're paying for the existing code with your improvements. The second is a valid reason to open up your codebase.

Really??

[linuxwrangler]

Why limit it to a country. Why not states? Or counties? Cities? In California alone we have many cities well over $100,000/year and others well under $10,000. Which arbitrary geopolitical line do you chose?

More germane to those of us in the US is why not limit the price that can be charged for drugs to the maximum charged anywhere else in the world. If it's profitable there, it can be profitable here.

Bottom line is that it is the legal responsibility of corporations to put their shareholders' interests first. Or, in the analysis of the movie "The Corporation", the corporation is a psychopath.

Re:Really??

[j-beda]

More germane to those of us in the US is why not limit the price that can be charged for drugs to the maximum charged anywhere else in the world. If it's profitable there, it can be profitable here.

It is at least mathematically possible to have different prices everywhere, and have the loss of any market make the whole thing unprofitable. From the global point of view, the company's profit is the different between TOTAL sales and TOTAL costs. If manufacturing costs are small relative to the total costs (which include research, development, advertising, and executive salaries and the like), then it is possible that you need silly high prices in some markets and comically low prices is other markets and any other pricing levels cause things to run at a loss.

Things are priced different in different places - even within the same city - and arbitrage opportunities cannot always be ecconomically exploited. Even within a single city, the ecconomic conditions in one region are different enough from other regions (average consumer incomes and average employment and other business costs) that arbitrage cannot completely eliminate the differences.

Not that I don't generally agree that it seems very unfair that such differences exist.

Da, comrade.

[Jay Maynard]

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

The most evil idea ever committed to paper. It's killed hundreds of millions.

But hey, it sounds good and makes your heart swell with pride, right?

Re:Da, comrade.

[j-beda]

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

The most evil idea ever committed to paper. It's killed hundreds of millions.

But hey, it sounds good and makes your heart swell with pride, right?

If you can't tell the difference between "good ideas" like "Turn the other cheek" or "Do unto others as you would like for yourself" or "Make America great" and the abuse of such ideas by evil people for their own gain, then you are certainly part of the problem.

Re:Da, comrade.

[Oligonicella]

No, he's simply aware that those ideas are only good on paper and that in reality they (and all other ideals) are failures, causing more harm than good and are typically used disingenuously during argument.

Turn the other cheek? Only good for achieving matching bruises. Ethically, it can be said that returning that slap is better as it may prevent the slapper from abusing others.

Do unto others is a good life goal, unless you keep doing so after getting screwed over by those others. Then it's simply enabling.

The last depends entirely on your interpretation of great and whether it was inserted genuinely or as a political barb.

Re:Da, comrade.

[HeckRuler]

Ok, fine. It's SOUNDS like a great idea, but it'll be abused by evil people for their own gain. Therefore we shouldn't do it.

    Does that little distinction make you happy?

Re: Da, comrade.

[HeckRuler]

the death toll of capitalism. Those people who starve to death because they can't afford food, die of curable disease because they can't afford medicines.

The 1890's? When late-stage capitalism was so bad and inequality was rampant and the robber-barons forced millions into deadly working conditions and overcharged them for basic needs?

Yeah, capitalism killed plenty. The riff-raff rebelled, fought, unionized, regulated the industries, busted up the trusts and took power away from the oligarchy. Been there, done that. We've learned that being too capitalistic is poisonous. Now we're capitalistic, but temper it with socialistic ideas like a progressive tax structure, regulation on industries, and monopoly/anti-competition laws. And if we were sane, we'd socialize healthcare. My dad's a diabetic. What's going to kill him is when he can no longer afford the doctor's visits and medicine.

The centralized economy that Stalin and Mao tried in the name of communism got a whole ton of people killed.

The ideas of capitalism and communism have killed plenty.

Re:Da, comrade.

[j-beda]

Ok, fine. It's SOUNDS like a great idea, but it'll be abused by evil people for their own gain. Therefore we shouldn't do it.

    Does that little distinction make you happy?

A bit - but I think the "we shouldn't do it" needs some work. I think we SHOULD aspire to good things, even if there is a danger of people misusing such lofty aspirations. Desigining social and political systems that are fair and equitable (recognizing what those terms mean in any situation are not always agreed upon) is something that we should be trying to do - but I do agree that taking into account how humans actually behave is an important part of making robust systems that are not easily abused.

How to actually build such systems I don't really know. Some combination of market mechanism and regulations to minimize unintended externalities often seems applicable. Some fundamental shifts in the way we divide up our society's immense riches between its members in light of the impact of automation, AI, and other advances seems likely to be necessary.

Re:Da, comrade.

[HeckRuler]

Jesus, focus. This ISN'T a "social or political system". It's an economic one.

How to actually build such systems I don't really know.

FOCUS. The proposal is to charge people for their software according to their ability to pay. Specifically charging nations with less GDP a lower rate.

And that might seem like a great idea. But people would take advantage of it. You can look at nearly any other post in this thread for examples, but we've got:

A) People will buy the software in el-cheapo land and bring it to the rich nation.

B) It requires nightmare dystopian levels of DRM to enforce.

C) It won't necessarily stop piracy.

D) It's not necessarily more fair.

E) GDP is a really rough-cut metric.

Because of those problems, it's a bad idea and we shouldn't do it. How about, instead of selling things cheaper to poor people, we tax rich people at a larger rate than poor people? That seems easier to control and manage. As for international inequality, let them freaking pirate it until they make enough money to be worth sueing. You can't sue poor people, they don't have anything to take. Get over it.

Some fundamental shifts in the way we divide up our society's immense riches between its members in light of the impact of automation, AI, and other advances seems likely to be necessary.

The proposal is how we divide up the costs, not the riches, but sure, close enough. Automation, AI, and advances are kinda moot in the discussion. There's plenty of inequality already and the issue is here and now not some far-off impending impact of future tech.

Yeah yeah, you're gearing up for the UBI rant. We get it.

Re:Da, comrade.

[j-beda]

Jesus, focus. This ISN'T a "social or political system". It's an economic one.

What, you want me to limit my digressions to the topic at hand? That's crazy talk!

Yeah yeah, you're gearing up for the UBI rant. We get it.

Am I that transparent? :-)

Canada is a perfect example

[DontBeAMoran]

The USD is currently worth 33% more than the CAD. Canadians are, on average, not paid as much as their American counterparts for the same jobs. That probably means we're paying nearly 50% if not more than someone in the USA for the exact same software.

Re:Canada is a perfect example

[green1]

You're omitting the fact that Canada is already subject to such regional pricing on many products making it far more than the 50% you quote.
Everything from books to music to cars to other items all priced far higher than the exchange rate would justify.
And to add insult to injury, we spend a fortune to enforce trade barriers with the sole purpose of keeping it this way.

From each according to his ability

[frovingslosh]

If you don't price your product based on GDP then you are not a true communist or socialist.

Of course not

[Jason1729]

What part of "Commercial" does the dumbass who posted this not understand?

Why stop there?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

How about pegging it to my salary? When I'm unemployed I'll buy the biggest IC design CAD package I can!

Re:Why stop there?

[HeckRuler]

And then you work your ass off for a few years making money. Then you take a break, earn zero income, and upgrade.

Bright Idea ?

[Crashmarik]

Even Lenin abandoned it for the New Economic Policy/plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

When Lenin thinks your idea is too communist, it's probably a bad idea.

Their job is to make money not to be fair

[Dr.Altaica]

It's more profitable to charge a few people a large amount instead of charging a few more people a smaller amount.
If they cut the price to one tenth the price then they have to sell ten times as much just to break even.

Why not?

[Sid314]

First, the author of the article doesn't seem to know of "commercial software". Ok, that aside, this isn't some massive ground breaking idea. Businesses already use different pricing tiers and models in different countries. It may not always be based on X (X = GDP here) but pricing is a critical business decision that pulls in many factors. It's not a flippant decision. And all this applies to software businesses too.

Where there is money there is a way

[Roger W Moore]

The fact that it's only sold in the App store now?

In which case you just connect to the app store for that country from wherever you are - I have accessed the Canadian store from Europe and the US without a problem in the past. If they eventually block that then you go through proxy and if they try to stop those they just end up playing whack-a-mole. Getting the money to the right store would be the hard part but if someone makes it worth their while I'm sure there will be resellers shipping iTunes gift cards to wherever the software costs significantly more.

The only way to preserve a price difference between two markets is to make the cost of getting around whatever barrier there is more expensive that the difference in price.

Reselling at lower price

[mjensen]

US sells software at $200 because if GDP, but it is $30 in Latveria. People will go to Latveria, buy all the copies and ship to USA to resell for a $150 profit each.

Commercial user are not representative

[Tjp($)pjT]

Small countries with low appearing GDP, may have a much higher PCDP/GDP Per Capita. So wealthy citizens get an underserved discount. Multinational companies might opt to buy their software in the country it costs the least in. Large corporations having a lower software cost would encourage outsourcing jobs from higher GDP countries.

This isn't the way to level the playing field, this would be a means to level the higher GDP countries, by encouraging outsourcing and encouraging domestic wealth transfer to lower GDP countries. So what this really is, is a tax on higher GDP countries. Do you really thing Saudia Arabia deserves to pay less for software that controls oil fields and production? By the time you make enough exceptions it becomes unworkable.

Fairness has a role

[Roger W Moore]

'Fair' is where you go to sell your pig, not the means by which you set the price.

That's only partly true. If your pricing is extremely unfair and what you produce is essential to people then governments can get involved and laws get changed to cut you profits, especially if you rely on those same laws, such as copyright and patents, to create artificial monopolies. This is happening with the pharmaceutical industry.

In the past Canada has threatened the patent protections of some firms and more recently the US seems to be finally waking up to the crap that these companies are pulling. So while you may set your price at a level that you think you can get away with, perceived fairness is a factor in what you can get away with and you ignore it at your peril.

Re:Fairness has a role

[mattwarden]

I don't really understand your point. Is it that govts can intervene and tell you to sell at a different price? Well, sure. We have all kinds of examples of govt all along a spectrum of interventionalism in markets. Parent was mostly saying that's a load of horseshit and you have every right to sell the fruits of your labor for whatever you want. Your reply really isn't s counter to that, if I'm understanding it correctly.

The patent issue is a tough one and I'm not saying it is set up correctly. But the purpose is not, as you say, to allow people to rely on them to create artificial monopolies. The purpose is to prevent unauthorized use by others of the fruits of your labor.

Re:Fairness has a role

[Roger W Moore]

I don't really understand your point. Is it that govts can intervene and tell you to sell at a different price?

The OP was arguing that you can charge what you like for your product regardless of whether the price is fair or not: as long as people are willing to pay it you can charge it. My point is that you do have to factor "fair" into your pricing at some level. If you completely ignore it then you will annoy enough people that governments will eventually act, especially if your profits rely on an artificial monopoly created by those governments' laws.

Re:Fairness has a role

[Sique]

If drug companies relied on trade secrets, you run into the problem of allergies, of unknown interaction between different drugs and all other problems which can only be avoided if drug companies reveal the ingredients of their drug.

Your idea would cause drugs to become more unpredictable and thus less effective.

Re:Fairness has a role

[Bert64]

If you created a cure for HIV then the companies selling existing treatments would likely buy you out, or bury you in court for years...

It's far more profitable to sell ongoing treatments which reduce the symptoms... The existing treatments for HIV can remain profitable for years, whereas you can only sell a cure once. There's no incentive to actually cure something like HIV.

Re:Fairness has a role

[djinn6]

I don't think there are any drugs out there that a good chemist couldn't reverse-engineer in a day.

Re:Fairness has a role

[clodney]

This is why big oil has been sitting on the technology to turn water into gasoline for years, and why I keep seeing ads about the miracle products that the power company doesn't want me to know about.

A company that had a cure for HIV would market it, for some combination of the following reasons:
1. Even if temporary, it would represent a massive slug of business, extending over multiple years. Given the short term focus of most US based businesses, that it hard to pass up.
2. The secret is too hard to keep. If your researchers have created something that is likely to lead to the Nobel prize, and the company decides to sit on it, it becomes a huge scandal waiting to be uncovered.
3. The situation is unstable. The first company to market a cure puts the recurring revenue of everybody with ongoing treatment at risk. It is like the prisoners dilemma. You maximize your profits by being first to market with the cure.

A cure for Hepatitis C has recently come to market. It is phenomenally expensive, but it is a genuine cure. That is an anecdote, but at least one instance of a cure being developed.

Re:Fairness has a role

[mattwarden]

We're going to need more tinfoil

The conspiracy you suggest simply cannot happen in a free market. If it were possible to do this in the US, it would have to involve artificial market limiters like the FDA. But then what about other countries? Not to mention that your worldview would predict no or almost no cures on the market, yet there they are. Even Martin Shkreli's drug Daraprim is a cure, and for an extremely rare disease with only 2000 or so patients per year. How can such a drug exist if what you say is true?

We kinda do that

[Camembert]

In my company we have such an approach for specific areas:
- Our training prices are linked to the GDP, in a few levels. In the lowest band countries this can be 40% of the full price. We do need enough participants however to cover the effort of coming over. Our training is an enabler for the software, it is mainly cost recovery.
- For specific software and services there can be special country promotions to boost adoption also in lower GDP countries. We don't do that explicitely for everything though.

Re:We kinda do that

[Camembert]

I should have added, these are not consumer or office level softwares that could be simply bought abroad and brought back.

The Supreme Court is why it won't work.

[SEE]

An approximation of this was done by many publishers with textbooks. The result was importation of the cheaper overseas editions of textbooks into the US. And the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Sale Doctrine covers imported copyrighted works.

Income distribution

[stephanruby]

Do you really want a gaming company to sell its games to an oligarch in Russia at roughly 3.7 times less the price of what they would cost in the US? Besides, it's not like a game is a vital piece of software to own. And in poorer countries, it's not like everyone owns a computer fast enough to run the latest game, or owns a computer at all.

And where it comes to non-gaming software, there are other ways a company can make sure its software goes to people who can afford it. It can create student licenses, language localized editions, versions for non-profits, nagware software, software which produces watermarked assets, web hybrid applications, open source software with various levels of support, etc. There are thousands of options, but ultimately the company making that software has to make this kind of decision for itself based on its own capabilities and based on what it thinks the market can bear.

In some countries, making payments can be so difficult as a consumer, that selling a piece of software at a fraction of the cost based on a country's gdp wouldn't necessarily work. And in other cases still, a company could easily cannibalize its own local customer base by providing competing foreign customers with cheaper software.

Bad Idea

[blindseer]

If this is a government imposed price control then not only is this a bad idea but one that has lead to the destruction of entire nations and killed many. Price controls enforced by the government do not allow the market to adjust pricing to meet supply and demand. Without proper market pricing we get hoarding, black markets, etc. Price controls is socialism. In socialism people wait in lines for bread, in capitalism bread is lined up waiting for people.

If a company chooses to control prices based on local markets then expect much of the same. If software is cheap in some nation where people don't make much money then expect a black market to pop up to buy low locally and then sell high somewhere else. Software makers can try to enforce this GDP based pricing with location enforcement of some kind but that's not too difficult to fake for the properly motivated.

Didn't textbook publishers already try this? They'd sell textbooks in other English speaking nations for cheaper than in the USA in order to compete better and/or comply with socialistic price controls on books. They tried putting different covers on those books but that didn't stop people in the USA from buying them, the content was still the same. Efforts to make the content different enough to matter costs money, negating any profit motive in selling the same books at different prices.

I cannot fault people for wanting to make a profit on their products. What they seem to fail to understand is that the world has gotten a lot smaller. I've gone to online retailers and orders products from Taiwan and Australia before. They arrived in my mailbox a week later. If I ordered from a domestic seller I'd sometimes get it overnight, and that has some value to me. If the price difference is large enough I'll wait that week if I can.

When talking about bread, textbooks, and so on this is a physical product. Software is not a physical product, the media might be but when is the last time you saw actual media in a software box? When was the last time you actually bought a "box" of software?

Just a bad idea. If actually implemented anywhere I'd expect it to die quickly.

Re:Bad Idea

[HeckRuler]

As a poor college student with no income paying American cost of living expenses, I desperately wanted to pay the cheaper foreign prices. And you could if you knew the right foreigner student who illegally sold them at profit.

Also, while I understand cheaper material and soft-covers, I think it's really going out of their way to edit the book to be more boring. That just seems vindictive.

and many times the professors would prefer the local books (local authors many times connect better),

The hell? You had professors that didn't demand you shell out for THEIR book? Huh, I guess America is just ahead of the curve when it comes to corruption.

So a 1st world programmer costs even more

[Maxo-Texas]

So a 1st world programmer has to pay $1200 for theri development kit while it's sold to a 3rd world developers for $70 or even given a way free.

Then the 3rd world developer is allowed to directly compete for work with the 1st world developer as if the both lived in the 1st world country.

Products should be sold for the same price in both locations since labor is forced to compete for living expenses and it's more expensive to live in the higher GDP country.

Unless you just want a lot of unemployeed people in the high gdp country.

This is literally extracting wealth from wealthy countries leaving less to circulate in the economy.

Re:MAGA

[Nutria]

MAGA? Make Americans Grope Again?

Monica Lewinsky called. She wants her blue dress back.

GDP or Per Capita?

[ermadhan]

Should price based on GDP or Per-Capita income?

Shared source license

[Desibert]

I was trying to start something called Shared Source License, that would protect the publisher from copying while keeping the original authors vested (creative/financial interests) in any forks & vice a versa. However, all my whole code bases was stolen and I'm now looking for psychiatric help to cope with the losses both personal and professional. So tread carefully .... the hit (wo)men walk among us.

Offshoring

[craXORjack]

Yes, if this idea were implemented, it would just make it even more economical to cut tech jobs in the first world countries and send that work to the third world where both labor and now licenses for software tools would be much cheaper.

Options

[AHuxley]

Make poor nations pay US$ 200 or 2000, buy a dongle, pay per seat or core, or rent per month.
Poor nations then have the option not to enforce software and copyright laws.
Don't peg anything to GDP. Just keep offering US brands at US$100 or 1000 or some other fee.
Digital enforcement is expensive in every nation. Once a nation is very low cost with exchange rates, whats keeping users globally from buying in that nation?
Per nation price enfacement with activation and per nation ip tracking per account?
Face local digital return laws and refund laws, tax collection per nation?
It will cost more to sell cheap than any poor nation can support in local profits after tax, support, lawyers.
Users won't pay US$10 or $50 for a "legal" version in a poor nation? What for? Support? The next version is "free"?
They can get their own translated copy for as a free download or on physical media for a few $ at a local market.
Games might be the only way to lock in users with multilayer per user accounts.
A $10 game pass in a poor nation vs $120 in a normal nation? The constant hunt for digital sales online of account details been used in wealthy nations?

From each according to his ability?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF nonsense is this?

Insert 25c; Slashdot the Great tell your fortune

[mattwarden]

> This presupposes the continuing existence of closed-source software businesses

Slashdot: declaring the imminent doom of proprietary software for 20 years

Re: Use Linux

[guruevi]

No, but at least your local economies impact the price. You pay $50k for a Windows Server license anywhere in the world. You pay $120k for a SysAdmin in the US, 20k for one in rural India.

The impact of the license cost results in Windows Server having a TCO twice the amount (compared to local economies) in India than the US (to small businesses at least). With Linux you still need the SysAdmin, but your TCO compared to local economies is equalized.

Let us rephrase

[SuperKendall]

Should extremely targeted software be priced according to the broadest possible metric?

All of this should essentially be up to the software developer, to price things according to who their customers are in various markets.

Now what I have read about is some app developers out of a spirit of charity, making apps free in some extremely poor markets (like Africa and India) to help out the population there.

Leasing business software is the way to go

[LeftCoastThinker]

From the perspective of the business that makes and sells the software, the best option is leasing. And to some degree this already goes on. This requires an always on connection, but it lets you expand into other markets at discounts and much lower cost entry points (as long as it is still profitable, which for software, once it is created, sale of said software is essentially 100% profit) without having to worry about profiteers taking the discounts that you offer to some and spreading them back to your primary markets. You might still sell licenses to first world markets for say $4000 each, but in developing countries, you can offer leases which require an always on connection and intermittently phone home to confirm they are being used as intended. The lease only requires an initial payment of maybe $400 per seat and $200 per seat per month after that, cutting the up front cash to 10% of the purchase price. If the cash flow benefit is greater than the lease cost, it should be widely adopted. You can cap the lease at $4500 or some such and then let the third world companies convert to licenses if you want.

Just straight discounts on goods due to a countries financial status is a bad idea for many reasons well outlined by other posts. Life saving drugs and food are a different story, but they are also necessities which puts them in a different light than software used to make money.

Fair means you're about to be screwed

[nicoleb_x]

Whenever I hear anybody talk about fair share or fair price or even common sense laws/pricing I know it's time to run for the hills because I'm going to be screwed.

The entire concept is a straw man argument. The assumption is that some mythical entity can afford to pay or not pay some price and that the company making the offer can somehow recoup their costs because they are overcharging some other mythical entity. No proof is given to justify the equation except, perhaps, anecdotal evidence that there are entities that can't/won't pay the asking price.

It's SOP that this scheme is only applied to intangible items because nobody would buy such an idea for something tangible like a car or a house or even a bag of groceries. Art, education, entertainment and computer software and always included in this scheme.

Fair == bullshit scammer

Wrong Metric

[nateman1352]

GDP isn't the right metric. If we used GDP the price would still be too high in developing countries. The correct metric is GDP per capita, or purchasing power parity.

Problem is you would need to region lock the software then through yet more DRM.

Not everyone in the third world is poor.

[westlake]

It seems to me you should be looking at the commercial viability of particular markets and not the dismal per capita income of the population as a whole. Licensing AutoCAD isn't going to break the budget of a $10 million dollar construction project in Central America.

The problem was caused by government...

[LoyalOpposition]

is there a way to make that pricing more fair?

Reduce copyright duration to two years and the "problem" will go away.

~Loyal

Re:Use Linux

[PopeRatzo]

Use Linux

No can do. Didn't you get the memo? We're only using American-made products from now on.

#AmericaFirst

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/ame...

Re:Just like textbooks

[green1]

There's also the Canadian edition at 200% of the US price, so don't feel too ripped off.

yeah right!

[gravewax]

Because people would abuse the process like they do for every other product that tries to accommodate local pricing considerations, with software this is even easier to do, a nice VPN and suddenly you are paying Ethiopian prices instead of US or UK prices. Open internet means such ideas simply don't work as people will work around it to get the best price.

this ask slashdot is stupid

[gl4ss]

because.

1) they are doing it(I bought doom 10 euros cheaper than in europe. chinese blurays are all the rage in asia. some of them legit).

2) the price of producing software is not really dependent on how much money the buyer of the software has.

3) are you really so fucking daft that you want to make it illegal to gray import software? seriously? you want a full on trade war or what?

It's all about the market.

[fatmatt_oz]

There's a slightly convoluted way to answer this question, but basically if there is a market for something then the "market" will find a solution. In the case of software piracy, if people in country X can't afford to buy the software they need/want AND the company who makes the software is unable or unwilling to enforce its IP in that country then people will pirate the software. I work with software that costs in the tens of thousands per seat and I hear about this happening in low GDP / income per capita countries. The interesting thing is that the piracy is concentrated on the more expensive software and they shops there tend to use only the (relatively) highly priced software. In countries where IP is more strictly enforced there are 3-5 competitors who make similar software with more reasonable pricing. They can't sell in the low GDP countries even at a lower cost because of the piracy of "industry standard" expensive stuff which is effectively free. I've heard stories about government departments installing this sort of software routinely on workstations. The problem with this is that problems can be solved in a lot of different ways, when everyone is using the same tools and is trained from the same pirated manuals and tutorials then the solutions are going to be limited to what those tools can do. In my country I've seen prices of run of the mill software decrease as competition increased. Reducing prices by location isn't the answer. Giving the small guys incentive to create a competing local product will.

Options

[snadrus]

1. Stop honoring BS US copyright law. Given enough countries, the whole copyright export concept will be in jeopardy.
2. Go open-source. $0+(local time) is always pegged to GDP.

Ekronomics says "Hell, yes"

[shanen]

Per https://ello.co/shanen0/post/n... the software that increases productivity is investment and extremely poor societies can't afford those investments because essential production is already absorbing all the available resources. Or in other words, there's no sense in trying to squeeze blood from a turnip when he doesn't even have a turnip.

Entertainment category software is different and there is no rationale I can see for discounting it. Right now I'm having trouble thinking of any software that would qualify as essential, at least in the context of an extremely poor society.

Region coding doesn't actually exist

[Blaskowicz]

I believe that for over a decade, almost all DVD players have been region-free, the exception being US or North America market.
Else, there are often remote-entered codes to unlock the player.

Of course people won't be interested in a DVD movie in the wrong language(s).
DVD in French-English might work in most of Africa but won't work in South America or Turkey etc. as far as people clearly understanding what's said by characters.

Re:Region coding doesn't actually exist

[indi0144]

Physical pirated copies anywhere have multiple audio tracks and subtitles as fas as i have seen, this is for optical media, USB thumb drives stacked to the firmware with the wares is another approach, I don't see why a turkish guy would stack the usb with movies/subs/muxes in Korean.

Though I have seen a huge increase in Netflix-only families, guess people value convenience even in developing nations, and that lead us to why GDP would not work (tho I'd love to see that) software is going with the subscription model, $2 $5 USD/Month is more than reasonable for a decent productivity app, this nukes the submitter's argument that software is too expensive, subscription model bring less overhead and they got you by the balls with the DRM. It's a win-win for everyone IN THE CLOUDD!!!1 tm

The priciest softwares I've come across in the dev. world are some obscure design and CAD programs, Seismic and petroleum stuff, I never saw anyone on those companies bitching about software prices, neither the single mom with an internet cafe and then never-activated Office 2016 that keeps that printer going.

Would love to do that

[rene2]

but then all the customers would feel cheated, that they have to pay a premium, ...

also if you want to sell in their local currency it becomes an accounting nightmare, :-/

Umm. Because of economics, stupid

[monkeyzoo]

> Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly?

Because that's not how supply and demand works.
For the same reason that iPhones and Honda's aren't pegged to GDP... the costs of R&D and production don't change and make a product less costly to produce because it is sold in a country with lower GDP.

Re: Umm. Because of economics, stupid

[PoopJuggler]

But they would sell more copies. Cars and smartphones can't be pirated. The economics of hardware and software are quite different.

Re: Umm. Because of economics, stupid

[monkeyzoo]

The objective of business however is to maximize profit, not unit sales. If it were the latter, all software would cost $0.01.

"In economics, profit maximization is the short run or long run process by which a firm determines the price and output level that returns the greatest profit."

Re:Use Linux

[Plumpaquatsch]

Problem solved.

So how does installing Linux make proprietary software that costs a lot of money and runs on Linux disappear?

EU

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the others said, this can't work, with the EU being the perfect example for this. Geoblocking cases are already progressing through courts, with legislation being added to outlaw these. But, on the other hand, you have member states with vastly different economic strenghts.

Re:MAGA

[Plumpaquatsch]

MAGA? Make Americans Grope Again?

Monica Lewinsky called. She wants her blue dress back.

Kenneth Starr wore it to Trump's inaugural ball.

GDP may not be an accurate measure

[Danathar]

Because GDP is a pretty broad statistic and conditions in one part of a country are not the same in another. Also, it might not be accurate.

In some cases they already are...

[cayce]

Steam (and other game companies) sells games under half of the US price in Mexico, but it's not related to GDP or out of fairness, it's the bottom line. They know they won't sell many games at $60 (median professional take home is $300 a week), but $25 is attractive enough, and the more people playing a game, the better it sells, so there's extra incentive for them to sell it cheaper.

Microsoft took a similar approach for lustrums, by letting cheaper markets pirate their software freely, then grabbing enterprise and government contracts, without much care about the small business or the home market. Again, not out of fairness.

Autodesk and Siemens have also alternate pricing on emerging markets.

Already exists

[mikethicke]

Regional pricing already exists on Steam (http://www.pcgamer.com/the-weird-ecomomics-behind-steam-prices-around-the-world/). When I worked in Kyrgyzstan (low GDP country), many games were significantly cheaper than in the US store.

More "fair"?

[moeinvt]

I don't even know what that means.

If we were talking about a commodity like prescription drugs, the marginal cost of each additional pill is probably a few cents. Companies can make a profit by selling to foreign countries at prices much lower than USA prices because there is a ban on bringing the products back into the country.

The marginal cost of creating another copy of a piece of software and issuing a license key is practically nil, but there's no good way to enforce an import ban. If software companies (I'm thinking EDA software like Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, etc.) started selling cheap software licenses overseas, customers will just set up their license servers in a country with "fair" prices and have their USA/European employees point to those license servers.

Bad idea. It would practically be a death sentence for companies making expensive CAD software.

You want to charge a percentage of income?

[HeckRuler]

Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly?

Because in places with massive Gini co-efficient, where there's a large amount of inequality like Saudi Arabia, the per capita GDP isn't indicative of the median income. All it takes is one rich motherfucker to raise the price of goods for the masses? That doesn't seem fair if you're trying to charge a percentage of income.

Because software is trivial to sell across state boundaries and you'd face arbitrage. People would buy the cheap version, and bring it or transfer it to the rich country. Because no matter what crazy legal or technical scheme you just thought of to try and thwart that you'll have people legally renting the product from some poor minnow farmer and using a VPN to make it think it's in Laos or some such crazy shenanigans to try and save a buck.

Because it's not necessarily more fair to charge a rich client more money for the same product.

And if you ARE trying to charge people a percentage of their income rather than a fixed price, and you could somehow magically make the software stick to that individual and only that individual, then why not just do that? Ask them to report their income, and then charge them a percentage of that. Surely they won't lie, right?

But that's an odd sort of progressive pricing structure I'm not sure about.

Re:A country's economy? Why not a state's economy?

[HeckRuler]

EXTRAPOLATE!

Let's go further, let's go down to the individual level. Everyone who wants to buy has to report their income.

The rich hoity-toity parents living in Manhattan would have to pay a couple thousand for Photoshop, while their children who have no income, could play with it for free. And as long as we have some dystopian nightmare DRM that restricts Mom from playing with Suzie's software, then it'll all work fine!

Who cares?

[hackel]

People who choose to use commercial software get the high prices they deserve. They shouldn't get any special discounts because of their country's economy. We should be doing everything we can to push everyone toward Free and open source software solutions.

Interesting editorial comment...

[sigmabody]

It's sorta off-topic, admittedly, but...

It's interesting that the editor chose to call out the assumption of the continued existence of the closed-source software businesses, without calling out similar precepts (eg: the continued existence of money, or countries). I mean, if money ceases to exist, then doesn't the question of pricing become moot? What about an asteroid wiping out life on the planet: that would also, presumably, substantially alter the economic dynamics of software pricing.

If you're going to call out exceedingly low probability future events to exclude from consideration, why stop with just one? Alternatively, why call those out at all?

A car analogy (well, a fuel analogy)

[GPS Pilot]

Gas prices here in Colorado vary greatly depending on whether you're buying in an elite resort community (Aspen, currently $3.24 / gallon) or a working-class community (Longmont, $1.99 / gallon). There's nothing wrong with that, as long as people are free to fill a couple 5-gallon cans in Longmont and haul them up I-70 to Aspen. I.e., as long as there are no restrictions (other than your own convenience) on your ability to circumvent regional pricing. In the software world, that means no regional DRM.

And unlike the time and effort it takes to haul around a heavy physical commodity like gasoline, a software installer can be instantly downloaded from anywhere in the world. So one might think that a regional pricing scheme (without regional DRM) would be doomed to fail. However, there are convenience issues: the online app store might not be in your language of choice, and it may not sell the software localized in your language of choice. So there's a few ways a seller could exploit regional differences. They should be free to do so, as long as they aren't imposing regional DRM.

E-sports needs free software

[tepples]

Games are different because their only utility is as entertainment, and few businesses can derive any benefit from that.

A professional or collegiate e-sports league is a business. Just as a league needs free video editing software to avoid having to pay to license proprietary video editing software, a league needs a free game to avoid having to pay the game's publisher for a license for each machine on which the game is played and for a license to perform the game publicly when streaming the matches.