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This post today is what is wrong with open source software. If someone knows jwe, then they should tell him that lots of corporates and startups WANT to suppor

This post today is what is wrong with open source software. If someone knows jwe, then they should tell him that lots of corporates and startups WANT to support stuff like this. But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. I need an invoice. Hell, if you can get a business account, I daresay you will get subscriptions. I like to call this "gratitude-ware". Check out Sidekiq Pro and their experience making 80k USD per month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449 At first I built Sidekiq as an LGPL project and sold commercial licenses for $50. Revenue was laughably small, but the response I got was encouraging: people told me they were saving $thousands/mo over previous solutions and wanted to buy the license just to give me something as thanks. Octave currently offers support packages for which you have to write in to the maintainer and have an email discussion. Compare that with Sidekiq : http://sidekiq.org/products/pro http://sidekiq.org/products/pro Its one of the best designed gratitude-ware page...even works amazingly well on a mobile phone. We personally also buy pfsense licenses https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html https://www.pfsense.org/our-services/gold-membership.html TL;Dr Donations wont work. Engineers cant give an excuse to corporate accounting. Make a pro subscription with ANY "pro level" feature. I can get my accounting to sign off. And no "contact us to find out about support contract".

vitro 10y ago
That seems like a good idea of a third party service - taking care of Pro subscriptions and invoicing for OSS projects.
chillingeffect 10y ago
Under rated post here. The key is to build a bigger solution around Octave, including say database or ML or simulation. A billable piece of IP. And streamline the surrounding commerce. ALso key is to locate Octave within the solution space, e.g. Startups who can't afford matlab. High schools. A formal online course. Makerspaces. Job seekers wanting to work with matlab.
Anechoic 10y ago
I'll add my voice as someone that would gladly pay $100/year for a few no-support type "licenses" (and I just made a long overdue donation to jwe). That said, I would understand if he didn't want to try an licensing like that for fear of angering The Mathworks.
dheera 10y ago
A couple of thoughts: - Octave won't die. It won't die even if you ditch it altogether. A lot of companies depend on it because licenses are free and that makes it easy to do massive parallel computations by launching thousands of instances. Matlab doesn't let you do that. As long as it stays GPL, the employees within those companies and academic institutions will continue to contribute to it. (Python is competition, but there are still plenty of Octave supporters.) - You might consider working for a company that is built around Octave. They would likely gladly welcome you as well as support you in spending a percentage of your time to maintain it, since their business depends on it. - Build something that people will pay for. Like a decent GUI for Octave that does everything Matlab's GUI does. Or a few awesome closed-source toolkits. That alone might support your personal income needs.
- fsloth 10y ago
  "Build something cool" is not sound financial advice for a person in a dire situation. The only reason it seems to work is because in the internet thousands are rolling the dice on this and you only hear of the few fraction of them who make it.
  - insulinrocks 10y ago
    "Get to the top of HN" might be good advice for an ask, though.
  - galfarragem 10y ago
    "Do not teach a starving man to fish".
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Indeed. First feed them; a dead husk has no use for fishing skills.
- tavert 10y ago
  > a company that is built around Octave How many of those are there? I give talks pretty frequently where I start by asking people in the audience what tools they regularly use for technical computing, and I'm legitimately surprised the few times anyone says they use Octave for things beyond classroom-level work. No offense intended to its developers, but Octave as a project seems like misdirected effort to me. Matlab the language isn't the most useful thing to try to emulate, Matlab the environment and tool set for getting non-software engineering jobs done is why people use it. For example, an increasing portion of the people who still use Matlab do so largely because of Simulink, for which there isn't a comparably effective open source alternative yet (you can sometimes use Modelica but there's less overlap in users than you'd think).
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saurik 10y ago
(I am honestly extremely interested.) It seems like Sidekiq is offering a slightly differen piece of software as the Pro version?
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  which is A Good Thing. Again, its those accounting people again "whats the difference between this and the free version". Selling open source is like selling any other enterprise software - you need to prove value. An alternative is to sell support (like pfsense).. which is pretty much the right to file bugs. We also buy a license for Handsontable Pro : we get right to file bugs and the fact that we get new features 3 months before the free version. Its just a way to package gratitude-ware to pass accounting inspection.
deleted 10y ago
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fsloth 10y ago
My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value. I suppose the simplest way would be to offer dual licensing. GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. The problem is, if the source code you are working on depends on third party GPL software it's very hard to do that. I think this is what should be fixed. There should be some way to have a chain of dual licensing, so that if someone uses a dual-licensed library, they can forward revenues simply to the original license owner from their proprietary license sales. Source remains open, and developers can eat (and pay for other amenities civilization has to offer). Blockchains?
- pksadiq 10y ago
  > GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. This is against the GNU GPL license terms. One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. Ie, a software released under GPL can't be restricted for some purpose (here, 'for non-profit'). The "no string should be attached" is for good. Say for example, a project says "For people to help learn writing code, I'm licensing my project under MIT License," it would be wrong to not release the source code (and only the binary) even if the code is in MIT license. Because that is the purpose why the developer choose MIT for his/her project. IANAL, but some corporate may be able to turn such carefully crafted words into money with their pricy lawyers. Most of the people are unaware of this. And for this reason, GPL can't be done the same way.
  - dllthomas 10y ago
    > One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. You can release code under however many incompatible licenses as you'd like, as long as you own all of the code in question.
    - ufo 10y ago
      I think they were referring to the "GPL for non-profit" part of the comment. You either don' release it as GPL at all or you release it as GPL for everyone, which means that for-profit companies can use the software free of charge (as long as they obey the terms of the license).
zerr 10y ago
> But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. Why?
- simonbarker87 10y ago
  Generally because of existing accountancy practices. In tiny companies, you can get away with it but any company of reasonable size will need a paper trail beyond "I donated to this guy as we use his free software"
- izacus 10y ago
  Because at least here in EU, you need an actual invoice for every expense that gets put into the accounting books. That expense can then be written off and doesn't count as "profit". Not having an invoice will make any EU-based company probably flatly refuse the payment due to how much accounting and revision issues that causes. Having a proper invoice (client address, your company address, VAT number) makes life significantly easier for accounting department and thus makes paying money significantly more likely. (There is also a lesson here for other US-based companies and conferences that can't produce a simple paper saying "Invoice" and a pair of addresses. Yes I'm looking at you 1Password.)
  - usernam 10y ago
    Having a VAT number in most EU countries has a fixed cost that is non-negligible. For a realistic example in Italy, having a VAT number implies a minimal fixed yearly cost of ~300eur (combining all various expenses) even for zero income. If you already are an employee, any extra income is likely to be taxed higher and require extra bookkeeping, to the point that cost parity is only attained if you can invoice for at least 450-500 eur. This is purely wasted money, without considering the extra work that you have to put into for the tax records. It's simply not worth it.
    - izacus 10y ago
      You misunderstood me, I didn't imply that you need a VAT number as a seller company (as a US company you can't even have it), but just that you should be able to produce a simple invoice PDF with your address, buyer address, buyer VAT (if needed) and a sequential number to provide a paper we need to properly add payment into the accounting books. And yes, I know that VAT isn't required piece of information on all invoices, but it WILL make the payment go smoother through the accounting departments which is what you want ;)
SandB0x 10y ago
I'd imagine it would be very hard to switch to that kind of model after all this time. Wouldn't guaranteeing a permanent level of support would likely involve hiring people and having to bring in enough to support them too? It might not be that hard if you're motivated and have that vision, but I can completely understand someone not wanting the added pressure after all this time.
fijal 10y ago
Maybe you're the one who can write a check, but this is a difficult topic... I do corporate accounting for baroque software and I can write an invoice and pushing people to pay for it is still quite a sales challenge - you need to be able to talk to high enough people and prove the value of what you're offering on top of the software you are already giving for free. It's not different to a standard issue sales exercise, except a little harder. This is not a skill that most open source project maintainers would consider themselves experts at. Giving advice like that is very dangerous - "only if you did that, you would make money". It's not a given that it would lead to something more than couple hundred dollars.
- paulryanrogers 10y ago
  "...software you are already giving for free" Free and open software has created the expectation that software has no cost. Trying to overcome that after the fact will take time and education.
  - beagle3 10y ago
    I suspect that is never going to change, and the same is true for many services. There is a community site I frequent that keeps itself afloat with a freemium model (if you pay you get more features; but you still get 98% of features even as a free user; there are no ads on that site). Many people understand this and pay to keep the site running, but something like 10%-20% of users claim that it's just a money grab because "facebook offers essentially the same features and they can do it for free, so obviously this site is trying to make a profit on our back". There is expectation that because some software is free, most software is free. Similarly, there's an expectation that if some websites are free, most similar websites should be free as well. p.s.: the main cost to using Facebook in my opinion is privacy, and I value my privacy much more than what I get from Facebook. Obviously. other people value privacy and facebookness differently.
scrollaway 10y ago
I don't believe there is a single OSI or common license that makes it straightforward for an author to say "This has all the open source freedoms, except for commercial uses" and sell the exception. When I see people asking if they can do this, they get laughed out of the room by others who claim that "open source freedoms" does not restrict commercial use. This is kind of a serious issue. Artists get such a license, a high quality one (CC-BY-NC). Programmers don't. Programmers are not licensing law experts, they won't make their own, and if they do they won't do it right. If you make it as easy to ask commercial bodies for money and still be OSS as it is to just build stuff for free, this story you mention will happen far more often.
- phaemon 10y ago
  Isn't that "The Non-Profit Open Software License"? https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Apparently not. Your comment actually made me look it up because my understanding was that these sorts of restricted uses weren't allowed for OSI licenses. Apparently NPOSL addresses an issue with some non-profits making warranties, not to restrict usage to non-profits: http://marlacorinne.4parkers.com/2014/06/20/non-commercial-open-source-or-not/ http://marlacorinne.4parkers.com/2014/06/20/non-commercial-o...
- ghaff 10y ago
  >I don't believe there is a single OSI or common license that makes it straightforward for an author to say "This has all the open source freedoms, except for commercial uses" and sell the exception. That's true and I'll argue that's a feature not a bug. It's also by design. The OSI specifically does not allow "for educational use only" and other types of usage discrimination. "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research." IMO, this was one of the things that open source software licensing got right. Non-commercial licensing of open source is intuitively appealing and is also a great way to not get software adopted. You're correct that CC, by contrast, does have an NC clause as an option. Even leaving aside philosophical points, I hold that this is a not a good license variant. Just about anything that isn't a trivial use has some commercial element to it. And what I might rationalize as non-commercial may well be different from what the copyright holder considers non-commercial. It's probably telling that CC has been kicking around the NC problem for something like a decade at this point and AFAIK is no closer to putting a stake in the ground now than they were then. See also: https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-creative-commons-license-make-sense/ https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-creative-co...
igk 10y ago
Meanwhile in Germany : as long as the institution can provide a Spendenbescheid, companies can in theory donate all they want and simply deduct it from their taxes. But all the Anglo companies don't grok this, so now students unions etc are moving to what you describe "sponsoring agreements",where they pull any possible benefit they could possibly provide for the companies on paper so it doesn't look like a donation...which is exactly what it is. Source : book keeper for a students union for years, dealt with this shit with our tax consultant all the time
- was_boring 10y ago
  Do you mind elaborating on this? Perhaps an example?
  - igk 10y ago
    Example : we organised a trip to a large trade fair and got 1000 € support pledged verbally by a large chip maker. As we get to the date of the trip, we get an email in English from the (apparently British) accounting department :they need a contract for sponsorship. We tell them that we thought they just wanted to donate the money (as did other German companies), mails go back and forth. Finally we slapped their logo on our site for the trip, added the tax we would have to pay on the money, then sent an invoice. As our tax consultant explained to me, they can reclaim the added tax through their own tax return, resulting in a net exchange of exactly 1000€- whatever the labour costs of everyone involved. Now, this trip was not too bad, but possible complications are : * What you get sponsoring for needs to be in proportion to the amount of money, leading us to need way more volunteers than originally planned just to deal with the overhead of the sponsor services in a career fair we organised * If you are tax exempt for charitable purposes, you need to very cleanly separate donation funded things from sponsorship or otherwise business funded stuff, because subsidising a lossy business is only rarely legal German-cultured(DACH) companies get the idea of "give money as a donation because what they do benefits us" a lot more than Anglo-Saxon cultured ones, at least in my experience, which might be reflected in the law
  - Tepix 10y ago
    I'm not sure he's correct. Donations to charitable non-profits are tax deductible both in Germany and the US IIRC.
gpvos 10y ago
I still do not get it. What explodes when a company donates (instead of paying for something with an invoice)? I cannot imagine that it is illegal.
- chillydawg 10y ago
  It's all legal and fine, it's just how do you get it approved? You're not actually buying anything, nothing will stop working and no projects will be impacted without the PO. In a large company, this effectively makes it impossible. The solution is to just pretend you're buying a minimal support contract and that'll get approved no worries.
  - gpvos 10y ago
    Shouldn't be a problem for smaller companies though? Or is the accountant going to withhold approval or something?
    - scott00 10y ago
      Every company has some process for buying something and paying for it. They have to. And similarly they have to have someone who, on a regular basis, approves purchases. Most don't have a process or person for approving donations. So at a minimum somebody has to think about it. Whether that's thinking about whether they have the authority to approve a donation, or thinking about who above them would need to sign off, or thinking about whether making donations is a good corporate policy, it's thinking instead of doing. It's a surprisingly significant barrier. Like how it shouldn't matter whether the buy button is reasonably sized and gray or giant and green, but in practice it does. You want to make it as easy and thoughtless as possible for people to give you money.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Furthermore, in large companies, charitable contributions are probably handled by a completely different organization with monies coming out of a completely different bucket than sponsorships being paid out by some marketing department or other.
stuaxo 10y ago
Pypy and Wine both have good models. With pypy, funding goes towards particular projects (e.g. STM). This may not be suitable for all projects or developers (libjpeg turbo being an example - he wants the freedom to be research lead and work on what he likes). If anyone, then the FSF should be looking into this problem, study all the models used, which are successful and provide some sort of template model for people to use. Licensing may be an issue, can you do the Sidekiq or Wine model when your code is GPL ?
- mperham 10y ago
  You can license your code however you like as long as you own the copyright. You can license it as GPL and sell an alternative commercial license for money.
radarsat1 10y ago
I agree. Two things though: * Developers, in general, are not business people. This may be different in Silicon Valley, but in a lot of the world, programmers have spent their life concentrating on one thing, learning to program. That doesn't mean they don't just "not know how" to start a business and find clients. It means they don't even know how to do the basic, first steps to registering one, knowing what to charge, etc. Let alone the complications of supporting an open source model on top of the usual business things like tax. It is just easier to throw up a paypal link and be done with it. Yes, something should be done about this, but there you go. * When people pay for things, suddenly they expect it to .. work. As in, be stable. And be supported. And be kept up to date. All of a sudden you go from being able to work on your favorite project to supporting clients and responding to their needs. Many programmers don't want this. Admittedly, if you're floating such a project as your main income, perhaps you should be considering these kinds of things, but on the other hand one thing that keeps an FOSS project going, and gives it advantages, is not having to worry about exactly these things. It also might have a huge disincentivising effect towards contributions; why would contributor contribute if they don't get a cut? There are specific challenges in business-oriented FOSS funding models that would need to be addressed.
- jlg23 10y ago
  > why would contributor contribute if they don't get a cut? I can only speak for me: Because I did not pay anything for the foundation I built on. If someone comes and asks for a cut (and I had this more than once), I give it to them: A fair share for their 3-line patch to a million LOC codebase, minus my fee for reviewing, for tutoring and for project management. Unfortunately, so far, nobody paid after I sent my invoice :(
- jordigh 10y ago
  These two points are very important. I've wanted to make Octave a business, but I just never knew how to start. I tried to find people who would help us get started, but the only ones I could find wanted to either compromise Octave's freedom (e.g. sell non-free extensions) or wanted some kind of way of turning Octave into a giant billion-dollar business very quickly. I couldn't find anyone who could help us do something like run a small business or just help us figure out how to sell those useless stooge licenses I keep hearing companies want to buy instead of sending donations.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Do people in general realize that software is one of the US's greatest strengths and that there is a staggering amount of innovation done via free/open projects? Or do they just know "SV has some big companies like Apple"? In all the debates about MAGA or how to invest in the country I don't think i've ever heard someone raise the issue of funding importent open source software (only indirectly). Actually for any country that can afford to invest, it provides so many benefits economically, competitively, academically, and strategically. Best of all it can boost macro productivity, which benefits everyone even if they have nothing to do with tech. Even lowly web development which people love to bash as changing too much. you can look at all of it as creative experiments in engineering that eventually end up advancing productivity. Who handles PR for open source anyway? Shouldn't a professional communications person work on building awareness, explaining the value, advocating for the cause?
hahamrfunnyguy 10y ago
It's quite likely the guy loves writing code for his project and doesn't want to bother with the mundane operational details of running a business. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
whyileft 10y ago
Or its a flaw in market capitalism. "When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail"
jordigh 10y ago
I know jwe. So, you want Octave to sell support contracts because accounting will never do donations. The two examples aren't selling just stooge licenses. In the case of pfsense, they're selling support. That means changing what jwe is doing from developing Octave to handling support calls. In the case of sidekiq, they're actually just selling plain ol' non-free software, which is what open-core is. jwe will never want to sell non-free software. He's already selling some support and has a few customers, but it's not easy. I often have heard engineers (who seem to sound angry or offended with the concept of a donation) say things like what you are saying, but I've never figured out how to satisfy them without either (1) just plain selling non-free software or (2) completely changing the focus of the work from developing Octave to doing some mind-numbingly boring task like getting Octave to run on RHEL 5.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  you are overcomplicating this. The better examples to look at are pfsense and handsontable. There is really no major distinction between the license and free software. Its basically an "early access right", a special package repo for pro customers and in case pfsense case.. an ebook. In sidekiq pro case, the "support" is a right to send email. If i may say so, that scales with the money you receive. How to set it up? take a look at sidekiq - they use https://plasso.com https://plasso.com. There are tona of alternatives in this space. More importantly, we are here to help. Please don't hesitate to ask. Also take a look at indiehackers.com to see how others did it. lastly - we are not angry.. we are frustrated because we have the ability to help. But open source software creators must empathize with procedures and stupid stuff like accountants. Unfortunately thats unavoidable, no matter how much you want to.
  - jordigh 10y ago
    The situation really is complicated if you are committed to the constraint of keeping Octave free. Sidekiq pro is just selling non-free software. It's not just the right to send email. My second idea was to move to an open core model: hold back more complex or enterprise-specific features from the OSS version, sell those features as an "expansion pack" on top of Sidekiq. Thus, Sidekiq Pro was born. This proved to be popular and forms my business today. https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=interview-promotion&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Indie+Hackers+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ec2594295f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_11_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_43062afaa5-ec2594295f-118903173 https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq?utm_source=n... I can't tell about handsontable, but it looks like again it's just plain ol' non-free software, although they do seem to let you look at the source code under what sounds like a restrictive license. pfsense also seems to sell a lot more than just an ebook. They sell backups, what sounds like another non-free addon "plus many more features". Maybe most people don't use any of that extra stuff? None of this sounds like it's just a matter of selling stooge licenses, and the sidekiq guy even said that selling stooge licenses didn't bring in any noticeable revenue.
codelitt 10y ago
One of the best things that can happen to an open source project is support from companies that use those projects. For example, Red Hat contributing upstream to Linux. We have a dedicated 20% time that employees can work on whatever they desire. I'd love to someday be able to fund a full time engineer that is able to contribute to projects we benefit from.
retube 10y ago
Maybe the best "gratitude-ware" page you know but am not convinced their communication extends to the front page. No idea what it is this service is or does.
tagrun 10y ago
> As a company, I cant do that. I need an invoice. ...which you get through the FSF donation link he provided. It's amazing that this is the top comment.
pinpelipon 10y ago
I work for govt, and I'd like to buy a lot of open source support contracts. As long as they are under the purchase limits that would force full tendering process things should be easy. But I simply can't donate.

vitro 10y ago

That seems like a good idea of a third party service - taking care of Pro subscriptions and invoicing for OSS projects.

chillingeffect 10y ago

Under rated post here. The key is to build a bigger solution around Octave, including say database or ML or simulation. A billable piece of IP. And streamline the surrounding commerce. ALso key is to locate Octave within the solution space, e.g. Startups who can't afford matlab. High schools. A formal online course. Makerspaces. Job seekers wanting to work with matlab.

Anechoic 10y ago

I'll add my voice as someone that would gladly pay $100/year for a few no-support type "licenses" (and I just made a long overdue donation to jwe). That said, I would understand if he didn't want to try an licensing like that for fear of angering The Mathworks.

dheera 10y ago

A couple of thoughts: - Octave won't die. It won't die even if you ditch it altogether. A lot of companies depend on it because licenses are free and that makes it easy to do massive parallel computations by launching thousands of instances. Matlab doesn't let you do that. As long as it stays GPL, the employees within those companies and academic institutions will continue to contribute to it. (Python is competition, but there are still plenty of Octave supporters.) - You might consider working for a company that is built around Octave. They would likely gladly welcome you as well as support you in spending a percentage of your time to maintain it, since their business depends on it. - Build something that people will pay for. Like a decent GUI for Octave that does everything Matlab's GUI does. Or a few awesome closed-source toolkits. That alone might support your personal income needs.

fsloth 10y ago
"Build something cool" is not sound financial advice for a person in a dire situation. The only reason it seems to work is because in the internet thousands are rolling the dice on this and you only hear of the few fraction of them who make it.
- insulinrocks 10y ago
  "Get to the top of HN" might be good advice for an ask, though.
- galfarragem 10y ago
  "Do not teach a starving man to fish".
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Indeed. First feed them; a dead husk has no use for fishing skills.
tavert 10y ago
> a company that is built around Octave How many of those are there? I give talks pretty frequently where I start by asking people in the audience what tools they regularly use for technical computing, and I'm legitimately surprised the few times anyone says they use Octave for things beyond classroom-level work. No offense intended to its developers, but Octave as a project seems like misdirected effort to me. Matlab the language isn't the most useful thing to try to emulate, Matlab the environment and tool set for getting non-software engineering jobs done is why people use it. For example, an increasing portion of the people who still use Matlab do so largely because of Simulink, for which there isn't a comparably effective open source alternative yet (you can sometimes use Modelica but there's less overlap in users than you'd think).

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saurik 10y ago

(I am honestly extremely interested.) It seems like Sidekiq is offering a slightly differen piece of software as the Pro version?

sandGorgon 10y ago
which is A Good Thing. Again, its those accounting people again "whats the difference between this and the free version". Selling open source is like selling any other enterprise software - you need to prove value. An alternative is to sell support (like pfsense).. which is pretty much the right to file bugs. We also buy a license for Handsontable Pro : we get right to file bugs and the fact that we get new features 3 months before the free version. Its just a way to package gratitude-ware to pass accounting inspection.

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fsloth 10y ago

My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value. I suppose the simplest way would be to offer dual licensing. GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. The problem is, if the source code you are working on depends on third party GPL software it's very hard to do that. I think this is what should be fixed. There should be some way to have a chain of dual licensing, so that if someone uses a dual-licensed library, they can forward revenues simply to the original license owner from their proprietary license sales. Source remains open, and developers can eat (and pay for other amenities civilization has to offer). Blockchains?

pksadiq 10y ago
> GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. This is against the GNU GPL license terms. One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. Ie, a software released under GPL can't be restricted for some purpose (here, 'for non-profit'). The "no string should be attached" is for good. Say for example, a project says "For people to help learn writing code, I'm licensing my project under MIT License," it would be wrong to not release the source code (and only the binary) even if the code is in MIT license. Because that is the purpose why the developer choose MIT for his/her project. IANAL, but some corporate may be able to turn such carefully crafted words into money with their pricy lawyers. Most of the people are unaware of this. And for this reason, GPL can't be done the same way.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  > One can't conditionally license some code under GPL. You can release code under however many incompatible licenses as you'd like, as long as you own all of the code in question.
  - ufo 10y ago
    I think they were referring to the "GPL for non-profit" part of the comment. You either don' release it as GPL at all or you release it as GPL for everyone, which means that for-profit companies can use the software free of charge (as long as they obey the terms of the license).

zerr 10y ago

> But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. Why?

simonbarker87 10y ago
Generally because of existing accountancy practices. In tiny companies, you can get away with it but any company of reasonable size will need a paper trail beyond "I donated to this guy as we use his free software"
izacus 10y ago
Because at least here in EU, you need an actual invoice for every expense that gets put into the accounting books. That expense can then be written off and doesn't count as "profit". Not having an invoice will make any EU-based company probably flatly refuse the payment due to how much accounting and revision issues that causes. Having a proper invoice (client address, your company address, VAT number) makes life significantly easier for accounting department and thus makes paying money significantly more likely. (There is also a lesson here for other US-based companies and conferences that can't produce a simple paper saying "Invoice" and a pair of addresses. Yes I'm looking at you 1Password.)
- usernam 10y ago
  Having a VAT number in most EU countries has a fixed cost that is non-negligible. For a realistic example in Italy, having a VAT number implies a minimal fixed yearly cost of ~300eur (combining all various expenses) even for zero income. If you already are an employee, any extra income is likely to be taxed higher and require extra bookkeeping, to the point that cost parity is only attained if you can invoice for at least 450-500 eur. This is purely wasted money, without considering the extra work that you have to put into for the tax records. It's simply not worth it.
  - izacus 10y ago
    You misunderstood me, I didn't imply that you need a VAT number as a seller company (as a US company you can't even have it), but just that you should be able to produce a simple invoice PDF with your address, buyer address, buyer VAT (if needed) and a sequential number to provide a paper we need to properly add payment into the accounting books. And yes, I know that VAT isn't required piece of information on all invoices, but it WILL make the payment go smoother through the accounting departments which is what you want ;)

SandB0x 10y ago

I'd imagine it would be very hard to switch to that kind of model after all this time. Wouldn't guaranteeing a permanent level of support would likely involve hiring people and having to bring in enough to support them too? It might not be that hard if you're motivated and have that vision, but I can completely understand someone not wanting the added pressure after all this time.

fijal 10y ago

Maybe you're the one who can write a check, but this is a difficult topic... I do corporate accounting for baroque software and I can write an invoice and pushing people to pay for it is still quite a sales challenge - you need to be able to talk to high enough people and prove the value of what you're offering on top of the software you are already giving for free. It's not different to a standard issue sales exercise, except a little harder. This is not a skill that most open source project maintainers would consider themselves experts at. Giving advice like that is very dangerous - "only if you did that, you would make money". It's not a given that it would lead to something more than couple hundred dollars.

paulryanrogers 10y ago
"...software you are already giving for free" Free and open software has created the expectation that software has no cost. Trying to overcome that after the fact will take time and education.
- beagle3 10y ago
  I suspect that is never going to change, and the same is true for many services. There is a community site I frequent that keeps itself afloat with a freemium model (if you pay you get more features; but you still get 98% of features even as a free user; there are no ads on that site). Many people understand this and pay to keep the site running, but something like 10%-20% of users claim that it's just a money grab because "facebook offers essentially the same features and they can do it for free, so obviously this site is trying to make a profit on our back". There is expectation that because some software is free, most software is free. Similarly, there's an expectation that if some websites are free, most similar websites should be free as well. p.s.: the main cost to using Facebook in my opinion is privacy, and I value my privacy much more than what I get from Facebook. Obviously. other people value privacy and facebookness differently.

scrollaway 10y ago

I don't believe there is a single OSI or common license that makes it straightforward for an author to say "This has all the open source freedoms, except for commercial uses" and sell the exception. When I see people asking if they can do this, they get laughed out of the room by others who claim that "open source freedoms" does not restrict commercial use. This is kind of a serious issue. Artists get such a license, a high quality one (CC-BY-NC). Programmers don't. Programmers are not licensing law experts, they won't make their own, and if they do they won't do it right. If you make it as easy to ask commercial bodies for money and still be OSS as it is to just build stuff for free, this story you mention will happen far more often.

phaemon 10y ago
Isn't that "The Non-Profit Open Software License"? https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0
- ghaff 10y ago
  Apparently not. Your comment actually made me look it up because my understanding was that these sorts of restricted uses weren't allowed for OSI licenses. Apparently NPOSL addresses an issue with some non-profits making warranties, not to restrict usage to non-profits: http://marlacorinne.4parkers.com/2014/06/20/non-commercial-open-source-or-not/ http://marlacorinne.4parkers.com/2014/06/20/non-commercial-o...
ghaff 10y ago
>I don't believe there is a single OSI or common license that makes it straightforward for an author to say "This has all the open source freedoms, except for commercial uses" and sell the exception. That's true and I'll argue that's a feature not a bug. It's also by design. The OSI specifically does not allow "for educational use only" and other types of usage discrimination. "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research." IMO, this was one of the things that open source software licensing got right. Non-commercial licensing of open source is intuitively appealing and is also a great way to not get software adopted. You're correct that CC, by contrast, does have an NC clause as an option. Even leaving aside philosophical points, I hold that this is a not a good license variant. Just about anything that isn't a trivial use has some commercial element to it. And what I might rationalize as non-commercial may well be different from what the copyright holder considers non-commercial. It's probably telling that CC has been kicking around the NC problem for something like a decade at this point and AFAIK is no closer to putting a stake in the ground now than they were then. See also: https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-creative-commons-license-make-sense/ https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-creative-co...

igk 10y ago

Meanwhile in Germany : as long as the institution can provide a Spendenbescheid, companies can in theory donate all they want and simply deduct it from their taxes. But all the Anglo companies don't grok this, so now students unions etc are moving to what you describe "sponsoring agreements",where they pull any possible benefit they could possibly provide for the companies on paper so it doesn't look like a donation...which is exactly what it is. Source : book keeper for a students union for years, dealt with this shit with our tax consultant all the time

was_boring 10y ago
Do you mind elaborating on this? Perhaps an example?
- igk 10y ago
  Example : we organised a trip to a large trade fair and got 1000 € support pledged verbally by a large chip maker. As we get to the date of the trip, we get an email in English from the (apparently British) accounting department :they need a contract for sponsorship. We tell them that we thought they just wanted to donate the money (as did other German companies), mails go back and forth. Finally we slapped their logo on our site for the trip, added the tax we would have to pay on the money, then sent an invoice. As our tax consultant explained to me, they can reclaim the added tax through their own tax return, resulting in a net exchange of exactly 1000€- whatever the labour costs of everyone involved. Now, this trip was not too bad, but possible complications are : * What you get sponsoring for needs to be in proportion to the amount of money, leading us to need way more volunteers than originally planned just to deal with the overhead of the sponsor services in a career fair we organised * If you are tax exempt for charitable purposes, you need to very cleanly separate donation funded things from sponsorship or otherwise business funded stuff, because subsidising a lossy business is only rarely legal German-cultured(DACH) companies get the idea of "give money as a donation because what they do benefits us" a lot more than Anglo-Saxon cultured ones, at least in my experience, which might be reflected in the law
- Tepix 10y ago
  I'm not sure he's correct. Donations to charitable non-profits are tax deductible both in Germany and the US IIRC.

gpvos 10y ago

I still do not get it. What explodes when a company donates (instead of paying for something with an invoice)? I cannot imagine that it is illegal.

chillydawg 10y ago
It's all legal and fine, it's just how do you get it approved? You're not actually buying anything, nothing will stop working and no projects will be impacted without the PO. In a large company, this effectively makes it impossible. The solution is to just pretend you're buying a minimal support contract and that'll get approved no worries.
- gpvos 10y ago
  Shouldn't be a problem for smaller companies though? Or is the accountant going to withhold approval or something?
  - scott00 10y ago
    Every company has some process for buying something and paying for it. They have to. And similarly they have to have someone who, on a regular basis, approves purchases. Most don't have a process or person for approving donations. So at a minimum somebody has to think about it. Whether that's thinking about whether they have the authority to approve a donation, or thinking about who above them would need to sign off, or thinking about whether making donations is a good corporate policy, it's thinking instead of doing. It's a surprisingly significant barrier. Like how it shouldn't matter whether the buy button is reasonably sized and gray or giant and green, but in practice it does. You want to make it as easy and thoughtless as possible for people to give you money.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Furthermore, in large companies, charitable contributions are probably handled by a completely different organization with monies coming out of a completely different bucket than sponsorships being paid out by some marketing department or other.

stuaxo 10y ago

Pypy and Wine both have good models. With pypy, funding goes towards particular projects (e.g. STM). This may not be suitable for all projects or developers (libjpeg turbo being an example - he wants the freedom to be research lead and work on what he likes). If anyone, then the FSF should be looking into this problem, study all the models used, which are successful and provide some sort of template model for people to use. Licensing may be an issue, can you do the Sidekiq or Wine model when your code is GPL ?

mperham 10y ago
You can license your code however you like as long as you own the copyright. You can license it as GPL and sell an alternative commercial license for money.

radarsat1 10y ago

I agree. Two things though: * Developers, in general, are not business people. This may be different in Silicon Valley, but in a lot of the world, programmers have spent their life concentrating on one thing, learning to program. That doesn't mean they don't just "not know how" to start a business and find clients. It means they don't even know how to do the basic, first steps to registering one, knowing what to charge, etc. Let alone the complications of supporting an open source model on top of the usual business things like tax. It is just easier to throw up a paypal link and be done with it. Yes, something should be done about this, but there you go. * When people pay for things, suddenly they expect it to .. work. As in, be stable. And be supported. And be kept up to date. All of a sudden you go from being able to work on your favorite project to supporting clients and responding to their needs. Many programmers don't want this. Admittedly, if you're floating such a project as your main income, perhaps you should be considering these kinds of things, but on the other hand one thing that keeps an FOSS project going, and gives it advantages, is not having to worry about exactly these things. It also might have a huge disincentivising effect towards contributions; why would contributor contribute if they don't get a cut? There are specific challenges in business-oriented FOSS funding models that would need to be addressed.

jlg23 10y ago
> why would contributor contribute if they don't get a cut? I can only speak for me: Because I did not pay anything for the foundation I built on. If someone comes and asks for a cut (and I had this more than once), I give it to them: A fair share for their 3-line patch to a million LOC codebase, minus my fee for reviewing, for tutoring and for project management. Unfortunately, so far, nobody paid after I sent my invoice :(
jordigh 10y ago
These two points are very important. I've wanted to make Octave a business, but I just never knew how to start. I tried to find people who would help us get started, but the only ones I could find wanted to either compromise Octave's freedom (e.g. sell non-free extensions) or wanted some kind of way of turning Octave into a giant billion-dollar business very quickly. I couldn't find anyone who could help us do something like run a small business or just help us figure out how to sell those useless stooge licenses I keep hearing companies want to buy instead of sending donations.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Do people in general realize that software is one of the US's greatest strengths and that there is a staggering amount of innovation done via free/open projects? Or do they just know "SV has some big companies like Apple"? In all the debates about MAGA or how to invest in the country I don't think i've ever heard someone raise the issue of funding importent open source software (only indirectly). Actually for any country that can afford to invest, it provides so many benefits economically, competitively, academically, and strategically. Best of all it can boost macro productivity, which benefits everyone even if they have nothing to do with tech. Even lowly web development which people love to bash as changing too much. you can look at all of it as creative experiments in engineering that eventually end up advancing productivity. Who handles PR for open source anyway? Shouldn't a professional communications person work on building awareness, explaining the value, advocating for the cause?

hahamrfunnyguy 10y ago

It's quite likely the guy loves writing code for his project and doesn't want to bother with the mundane operational details of running a business. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

whyileft 10y ago

Or its a flaw in market capitalism. "When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail"

jordigh 10y ago

I know jwe. So, you want Octave to sell support contracts because accounting will never do donations. The two examples aren't selling just stooge licenses. In the case of pfsense, they're selling support. That means changing what jwe is doing from developing Octave to handling support calls. In the case of sidekiq, they're actually just selling plain ol' non-free software, which is what open-core is. jwe will never want to sell non-free software. He's already selling some support and has a few customers, but it's not easy. I often have heard engineers (who seem to sound angry or offended with the concept of a donation) say things like what you are saying, but I've never figured out how to satisfy them without either (1) just plain selling non-free software or (2) completely changing the focus of the work from developing Octave to doing some mind-numbingly boring task like getting Octave to run on RHEL 5.

sandGorgon 10y ago
you are overcomplicating this. The better examples to look at are pfsense and handsontable. There is really no major distinction between the license and free software. Its basically an "early access right", a special package repo for pro customers and in case pfsense case.. an ebook. In sidekiq pro case, the "support" is a right to send email. If i may say so, that scales with the money you receive. How to set it up? take a look at sidekiq - they use https://plasso.com https://plasso.com. There are tona of alternatives in this space. More importantly, we are here to help. Please don't hesitate to ask. Also take a look at indiehackers.com to see how others did it. lastly - we are not angry.. we are frustrated because we have the ability to help. But open source software creators must empathize with procedures and stupid stuff like accountants. Unfortunately thats unavoidable, no matter how much you want to.
- jordigh 10y ago
  The situation really is complicated if you are committed to the constraint of keeping Octave free. Sidekiq pro is just selling non-free software. It's not just the right to send email. My second idea was to move to an open core model: hold back more complex or enterprise-specific features from the OSS version, sell those features as an "expansion pack" on top of Sidekiq. Thus, Sidekiq Pro was born. This proved to be popular and forms my business today. https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=interview-promotion&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Indie+Hackers+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ec2594295f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_11_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_43062afaa5-ec2594295f-118903173 https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq?utm_source=n... I can't tell about handsontable, but it looks like again it's just plain ol' non-free software, although they do seem to let you look at the source code under what sounds like a restrictive license. pfsense also seems to sell a lot more than just an ebook. They sell backups, what sounds like another non-free addon "plus many more features". Maybe most people don't use any of that extra stuff? None of this sounds like it's just a matter of selling stooge licenses, and the sidekiq guy even said that selling stooge licenses didn't bring in any noticeable revenue.

codelitt 10y ago

One of the best things that can happen to an open source project is support from companies that use those projects. For example, Red Hat contributing upstream to Linux. We have a dedicated 20% time that employees can work on whatever they desire. I'd love to someday be able to fund a full time engineer that is able to contribute to projects we benefit from.

retube 10y ago

Maybe the best "gratitude-ware" page you know but am not convinced their communication extends to the front page. No idea what it is this service is or does.

tagrun 10y ago

> As a company, I cant do that. I need an invoice. ...which you get through the FSF donation link he provided. It's amazing that this is the top comment.

pinpelipon 10y ago

I work for govt, and I'd like to buy a lot of open source support contracts. As long as they are under the purchase limits that would force full tendering process things should be easy. But I simply can't donate.