What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

There is this hole-in-the-wall looking place in NYC chinatown that serves Chinese comfort food meal. It closes real late and remains affordable while serving great meals. It is frequented by Michelin star rated restaurant chefs (of all cuisines) for the after dinners hours mostly through word-of-mouth.

Now I'm certain that the owner of the place knows he can charge more and rebrand to the mass audience. But I'd like to think it is a point of pride that his successful peers enjoy his services and that trumps any desire to change from the status quo.

He is happy being Chef2Chef and I'm glad Colin is happy being Geek2Geek.

So what is the place?

Great NY Noodle Town

Fantastic analogy. Nicely done.

A businessman is on vacation on an island; walking on the beach, he comes across a middle-aged man sitting next to a very small rusty boat.

- What do you do?

- Right now I'm not doing anything; sometimes I fish.

- So you're a fisherman?

- If you want to call it that.

- Why aren't you fishing now?

- As I'm sure you'd put it, I have reached my daily quota.

- What's your quota?

- One fish a day. At most. Some days I don't catch any.

- One. Fish. A. Day?? You can't make a living with one fish per day! Where do you even go to sell just one fish??!?

- I don't sell it. I eat it.

The businessman stays silent for a while, watching the man watching the sea. Then he says

- Listen, I'm a businessman. Don't you want to hear some advice about how to grow your business?

- Shoot.

- First, you should make it your goal to catch as much fish as possible, every day. There must be a market somewhere on this island where you could sell it?

- There is. 2 miles from here.

- Okay, great. You catch a lot of fish, you walk to the market, you sell the fish, keeping some for your own consumption if you wish.

- And then?

- And then, with the money you buy a net. A net will let you catch so much more fish at once.

- And then?

- And then you catch more fish, you sell more fish, you make more money. With the money, you can buy a better boat.

- Better in what sense?

- Bigger, nicer -- better looking! And with that boat you'll be able to catch even more fish.

- Oh. And then what?

- Then you make even more money, and you can save it.

- Save it?

- After your expenses are paid, you keep the extra money; after a while you'll have lots of money.

- And what do I do with that money?

- Once you have enough money, you'll be able to retire! You won't have to work anymore!

Now it's time for the fisherman to think. He stares at his feet for a while and says

- But I'm not working right now.

What is the name of this place?

I am not happy with it at all.

You know what he could do with the millions Tarsnap could make him? DONATE IT TO FREEBSD. How about that being Geek2Geek? How much more better off would the world be if Colin donated $500,000.00 of his surplus income from the business to the FreeBSD foundation? Or the Python foundation? Or THE FSF?

It's infuriating how blind many intelligent people are to how much better the world would be if they allowed more money. I don't care if that ends up being them buying a new house or donating it or building another amazing business or having the money to live while they write more amazing open source software.

What if by making more money Colin is able to start another business that does unknown and amazing things for cryptography! The possibilities are endless and makes me SO ANGRY that people with such amazing knowledge and skill that is so much more than mine are SQUANDERING IT BY THINKING THEY ARE DOING THE WORLD JUSTICE BY NOT CHARGING MORE MONEY!

If you are paying less, you can do all those things.

No. You cannot.

Do I donate money to certain projects of mine? Sure. When did I donate the most money? When I billed a private equity firm $300.00 per hour for development work and had a surplus of $15,000.00 dollars. I gave quite a bit to the FSF and others.

Do you really think that by charging the PE firm $50.00 per hour I would be enabling them to donate to the FSF? FreeBSD Foundation? Haskell? GNU? Do you even think they would or care? I certainly wouldn't have enough money to do so at that rate, but I did at $300.00 per hour.

Highly naive my friend. I'm sorry to be offensive but I'm sick of my intelligent peers (sometimes even more intelligent) squandering what is, a massive opportunity sitting in front of them that is being ignored for a totally ridiculous noble cause when their "noble causes" could be enhanced so much more without an iota of evil behavior.

Tarsnap isn't going to become an big evil corporation by charging more. It might if he decides to sell it, but I doubt that. It would be enabling him to do even more amazing things for software, geeks, the world, whatever. Those amazing things could be donations to enable OTHER brilliant people or it could be a new business, or new features that make backups a better experience, or it could be starting an R&D lab for crypto that pumps out purely Open Source research on cryptography that makes its way back into Tarsnap or different business.

Patrick actually answers this point. The shorter is that while people are free to spend as they please to charities, businesses usually don't. He goes on to note that businesses have very different value structures. This means that while I may consider a hundred buck real money, an enterprise business very likely will not. The final bit is that businesses value some things disproportionately highly compared to the trivial cost of it. There are plenty of reasons for this that he makes clear.

But that value is for that service, not a charity. It will never get redirected otherwise. So getting a business to happily pay a large sum for a cheap service is a fantastic way to ensure you now have the money to donate, and likely an order of magnitude more.

This is also the reason he says to charge $500 a month, but to give away the service to them that need it. Because the business is effectively subsidizing the needy here, while itself provably working in it's own interest. This is pretty win-win if anything.

Or increase your salary and use the surplus to donate. But really most of that profit should probably be directed to improving the business, or R&D that goes back into the business (which can be opensource!).

It's incredibly selfish to leave huge amounts of money on the table when your customers would both a) increase and b) not mind paying it and then you could e.g. give it to charity or something.

It's not like it would have to stop being tarsnap. Most of these suggestions are simple common sense. I'm a fucking nerd and need something like tarsnap and the thought of "picodollars" means I'll never give him my money (even if he reprices) because it means I can't rely on his business to not do completely nonsensical things.

Anothing thing he mentioned which I think is really important here is that a business (at least his own) cannot make a donation, that's an unnecessary business expense. It seems important to understanding his view - he wants to pay more for an even better service but literally cannot do so legally.

Wasn't there a fable posted to HN which continued this story -- about how the businessman found the fisherman's neighbour to serve the market?

I don't know why you are being down-voted.

Here's a follow-up and slightly different take on that story: http://blog.figuringshitout.com/the-parable-of-the-fisherman...

Here's an HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6602351

Isn't that kind of selfish though? Hiding your light under a bushel and all that. If the guy could be making many more people happy by having them enjoy his great food, but keeps it as a secret only for those in the know... it's his right, but I don't think it's very admirable.

My question here is: why can't a business make an "unnecessary business expense"? Are businesses legally forbidden from doing so? Really? Why?

Or does it just mean that the business can't deduct it from its earnings for tax reasons? In that case, why doesn't the business just pay the extra tax? In my eyes, there's nothing wrong with paying tax.

I just cannot understand why anyone would make a rule against such a thing.

(Note: as you probably already understand, I do not run a business.)