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Despite the passage of time, is it any easier today for a small startup or individual developer to make a living from their open source product? Thousands of d

Despite the passage of time, is it any easier today for a small startup or individual developer to make a living from their open source product? Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients or customers using open source software. But what if the developer simply wants to charge a business for using their open source product? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can sell your free software by charging for distribution [1] (for example via CD-ROMs). But while physical media may have made sense in an era of dial-up modems and low-bandwidth connections, no-one can realistically charge for distribution today - not least when so many projects are hosted for free on GitHub. So what's the alternative if you aren't a large company? There's the dual-licencing approach (Red Hat). The open core approach (GitLab). There's also the option of charging for support only (probably the most unattractive and unappealing option for many developers). Or there's the Kickstarter or Patreon approach (e.g. Krita) which simply isn't a sustainable long-term solution. For developers who want to support themselves with their open source product, it seems amazing that we have no licencing model for the following scenario: I have an open source product. It will forever be open source. You are free to evaluate the software as long as you need to. If you are a business, you must pay a fee to use the software if you wish to continue using it after evaluation. You don't get more features for paying the fee: there are no closed-sourced extensions available for additional cost. There is no tracking of software usage - we rely on your goodwill to pay for the software if you use it for your business. What, if anything, is unrealistic or unreasonable about this scenario? And do current open source licences support it? [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

rectang 9y ago
> Despite the passage of time, is it any easier today for a small startup or individual developer to make a living from their open source product? You answer your own question: > Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients or customers using open source software. That is the model that has grown massively. There are many more companies these days with acceptable open source contribution policies and who will pay their employees for time spent contributing to open source when that time provides the company with good value. > But what if the developer simply wants to charge a business for using their open source product? That's harder. But does it matter?
cmsj 9y ago
(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, but this post is my personal opinion, as someone who has believed strongly in the moral superiority of Open Source, since before I even knew such a term existed) tl;dr, no. If you make a great piece of software and then license it in a way that allows for cost-free redistribution, you're definitely going to struggle to make money if your models are all focussed around making money from distribution :) You used the specific phrase "FOSS product" and then talked about various approaches - none of which are actually FOSS products. There is certainly a lot of FOSS involved, but to me, the "product" is what you sell, and everything else is infrastructure. In each of those cases, what is being sold as a product, mostly isn't even software, it's access to updates (as opposed to the updates themselves), access to support, etc. Only the open core approach is really relevant, and it's a terrible model full of horrible tensions. I think that the difficulty of making a truly "FOSS product" is one of the big reasons why Linux on the desktop will never happen. High quality desktop applications are really hard to write, and there's very little opportunity to sell something around them, or use them to build something more. Linux on the server, or Linux in devices though, happened easily because who doesn't want to get all of the infrastructure you need to build cool/useful products/services, for ~nothing! So, in summary, IMHO FOSS shines for infrastructure projects, and it's possible to make money from those, but usually only really by using them to make something else.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> For developers who want to support themselves with their open source product, it seems amazing that we have no licencing model for the following scenario Source-available, paid license software with no enforcement mechanism (source-available shareware, basically), as you describe, is possible, but it is not “open source”. The problem is that almost no one is going to contribute to it, so you lose the benefit to the vendor of open source, and almost no one is likely to pay for it if there is clearly no enforcement, so you lose the benefit of commercial software as well. Open core (where extra features support sales) or open source with paid support (especially for enterprise, where support is what businesses pay for even with traditionally licensed software, anyway) are things that are more likely to work in practice, which is why they are more well represented in the market.

rectang 9y ago

> Despite the passage of time, is it any easier today for a small startup or individual developer to make a living from their open source product? You answer your own question: > Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients or customers using open source software. That is the model that has grown massively. There are many more companies these days with acceptable open source contribution policies and who will pay their employees for time spent contributing to open source when that time provides the company with good value. > But what if the developer simply wants to charge a business for using their open source product? That's harder. But does it matter?

cmsj 9y ago

(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, but this post is my personal opinion, as someone who has believed strongly in the moral superiority of Open Source, since before I even knew such a term existed) tl;dr, no. If you make a great piece of software and then license it in a way that allows for cost-free redistribution, you're definitely going to struggle to make money if your models are all focussed around making money from distribution :) You used the specific phrase "FOSS product" and then talked about various approaches - none of which are actually FOSS products. There is certainly a lot of FOSS involved, but to me, the "product" is what you sell, and everything else is infrastructure. In each of those cases, what is being sold as a product, mostly isn't even software, it's access to updates (as opposed to the updates themselves), access to support, etc. Only the open core approach is really relevant, and it's a terrible model full of horrible tensions. I think that the difficulty of making a truly "FOSS product" is one of the big reasons why Linux on the desktop will never happen. High quality desktop applications are really hard to write, and there's very little opportunity to sell something around them, or use them to build something more. Linux on the server, or Linux in devices though, happened easily because who doesn't want to get all of the infrastructure you need to build cool/useful products/services, for ~nothing! So, in summary, IMHO FOSS shines for infrastructure projects, and it's possible to make money from those, but usually only really by using them to make something else.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> For developers who want to support themselves with their open source product, it seems amazing that we have no licencing model for the following scenario Source-available, paid license software with no enforcement mechanism (source-available shareware, basically), as you describe, is possible, but it is not “open source”. The problem is that almost no one is going to contribute to it, so you lose the benefit to the vendor of open source, and almost no one is likely to pay for it if there is clearly no enforcement, so you lose the benefit of commercial software as well. Open core (where extra features support sales) or open source with paid support (especially for enterprise, where support is what businesses pay for even with traditionally licensed software, anyway) are things that are more likely to work in practice, which is why they are more well represented in the market.