rent-seeking-software.md (1954B)
1 # Rent-Seeking Software 2 3 ## Learned Helplessness 4 5 Rent-seeking behavior is when individuals manipulate policy and market conditions to amass wealth without providing value. In some contexts, like actual rent, such behaviors are quite logical; property is a scarce resource, there are laws around development, and so there is an incentive to manipulate these laws to amass wealth. 6 7 The confusing part of this is why rent-seeking behavior exists in software. Instructure provides no value in their hosting of Canvas beyond what two sysadmins could manage with a VPS, the software is licensed under the AGPL so they are not peddling proprietary software, they have simply tricked people into believing they are helpless to do anything such that they have to pay for every service they want. 8 9 Frequently people claim it is cheaper to outsource their software services, which I am highly suspicious of, and it decreases their exposure in the case of a cybersecurity incident. This is such an inconsiderate stance. If a crime is commited against your employees, your customers, or the public and your primary concern is how this will impact you financially you are failing morally. 10 11 People selfhost services all the time. This isn't something that requires a high degree of sophistication, just the ability to read, and a couple of weekends. I find selfhosting to be more difficult than hosting commercial software because hosting commercial software generally comes with commercial resources whereas selfhosting frequently means running docker on a rasberry pi sitting on the floor, a much less resilient configuration. 12 13 --- 14 15 This is sort of all over the place, but this is reactionary to the canvas / instructure breach which has impacted a fairly sizeable number of students who really shouldn't've been impacted by this because this was likely an instructure problem, not a canvas problem (shinyhunters seem to mostly do social engineering type stuff).