Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Usually, there are regulations against selling products under value. It is just that, for some reason unbeknownst to me, these laws never seem to be applied to software.

The usual regulations apply to selling products below the marginal cost of production - if mining 1 gram of unobtanium and shipping it to me costs you $1,500, then you cannot sell unobtainium to me for less than $1,500 per gram; if the mining is $500 of machine time, and shipping is $1,000, that sets your lower bound. However, the cost of finding unobtanium deposits, and of designing and building the mining machine, are ignored for this analysis; it may cost you billions of dollars in analysis to find each gram of unobtanium, or trillions of dollars to design and build a mining machine that works long enough to mine 10 grams before needing replacement, but that's ignored by the rules.

So, for example, you can't sell DRAM chips at less than the cost of making a DRAM chip; you can sell them cheaply, but it must be possible for someone who owns a semiconductor fabrication plant to make DRAM chips at or above the price you sell them for. Note, though, that semiconductor fabs are expensive, but that cost is not taken into account here; it's assumed that you already own one for the purposes of determining if you're selling DRAM chips at a loss, and so what's accounted for is the cost of silicon wafers, dopants, chemicals and electricity (over and above that consumed if the plant is idling waiting for an order) to run the plant for the duration of a batch of DRAM chips, etc.

Software escapes from this because virtually all the cost of software is in the analysis and design phases, which are outside the rules; the marginal cost of one more copy of a piece of software that already exists is tiny (what's the total cost of transferring 1 GiB from my server to yours, given that the cost of the server and the Internet connection are already paid, and it's only the additional electricity over and above idle that counts?), and the rules say that it's only those marginal costs that matter.

Also, importantly, this has only become a significant issue now that electronic distribution is cheap; in the days when software came on physical media (tapes, disks, CDs, DVDs etc), your bound on the price was set by the cost of the medium you were using; if getting a DVD pressed costs you $500 per thousand disks, your lower bound on price is $0.50. With Internet distribution of software (or music or video for that matter), your lower bound is some tiny fraction of a cent, and accounting rules let you write it off because it's so small; for example, if you use (chosen at random) Backblaze to store software for distribution, then your marginal cost is at most $0.01/GB plus $0.0000004 per copy. For a piece of software that's 10 MB in size, that's close enough to zero to be a permissible write-off.