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Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Are the available options stacked against them? Thousands of de

Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Are the available options stacked against them? Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients using open source software. But what if you don't want to be a consultant and simply want to charge a business for using your open source product? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can sell your free software by charging for distribution (for example via CD-ROMs). Physical media made sense in an era of dial-up modems and low-bandwidth connections, but no-one can realistically charge for distribution today - not least when so many projects are hosted for free on GitHub. See: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html So what are the alternatives? - There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. (Naturally doesn't work with permissive licences. Requires a strong copyleft licence like the GPL). - The open core approach e.g. GitLab. - There's also the option of charging for support only - I'm guessing this is an unattractive and unappealing option for many developers who'd much rather be building their product. - Or there's the Kickstarter or Patreon approach which simply isn't a stable, sustainable long-term solution. There have been some alternative licence approaches such as the Fair Source licence (fair.io). This is neither open source or closed source but allows developers to charge for their software. The large market for Wordpress plugins is an interesting case study. Wordpress is published under the GPL v2, but many Wordpress plugins are not open source. No one polices this, but those plugin developers are selling their software to businesses who are willing to pay for the features of those plugins. So who here in 2018 has made a success selling their open source software? Did you follow one of the models above? And who has struggled to make it work?

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Do you really expect people to pay for something when they can get it for free? Making software open source means you are either selling something complementary (hardware, other software, services) or else begging for crumbs.
- mcny 8y ago
  I don't know much about these things and I'm making this up as we go but I wonder if we can use AGPL or a stronger version of AGPL. Basically, you pay for a subscription or everything on your servers that touches this software must be free and open source. Should work for researchers and students and there is a continued revenue stream. For example, require any software that talks to a rest API also be foss. With more people paying, the subscription can slowly become cheaper and more accessible. Thoughts?
  - tormeh 8y ago
    Many companies already do this. See Mobicents, which we use at my current job.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Thoughts? It depends. In my own business I decided open source 'customers' are more trouble than they are worth so I do very little. Just the fact that people are willing to pay for my software is a strong validation that I'm doing something useful and on the right course.
pjmlp 8y ago
As someone that was part of an effort to do this in the early .com days, it is a lost hope trying to sell open source software to consumers. While selling to enterprise can be made via consulting and training, most consumers just want a one time shot paying for their software. Well, if you do that with commercial software, usually the only way to avoid paying is piracy. In open source world, they can just go to another guy that is re-packaging your work and making it available for free, thus killing your source of income. Which is the major reason most desktop software shops are going the store model, hoping that higher control will prevent that kind of workaround (which doesn't work with rooted devices anyway), or forcing consumers to migrate to a SaaS like in the good old timesharing days. I might add that FOSS developers are the first to blame, as contrary to most professions, many go to great lenghts to avoid paying anything, while feeling entitled their costumers pay them. I am overgeneralizing here, but you see it every time someone comes up with licensing changes as means to be able to keep working on the product that they love, right away the forum gets flooded with free beer alternatives and vocal complaints how everyone is going to migrate to something else.
- open-source-ux 8y ago
  Yes, I agree with what you say. I actually think the dual-licencing model seems the most realistic for many developers who are selling to a business. Ironically, it's because a strong copyleft licence like the GPL is unattractive to many businesses that they naturally turn to the commercial licence which allows them to make changes they don't need to release publicly. I'm sympathetic to what Fair Source is trying to do, but even that garnered a lot of negative reaction among developers (at least if you read the discussion on Hacker News).
- tormeh 8y ago
  I don't think the primary problem is cost, but that when you build your product tightly coupled with a propretary product that is hard to migrate off of then the vendor of that product can shake you down, or they can go bankrupt or what have you. It makes your business vulnerable, and no one wants that. Also your production environment crashing because a license expired. Fun times.
mikece 8y ago
Let's look at your examples about Red Hat and GitLab. Managers pay for service contracts from those companies so they have a "throat to choke" if things go sideways so it's not simply their neck on the line. From a CIO's point of view, a service contract is an insurance policy against standing before the CEO or board and saying "I have nobody but myself to blame, I have nobody but my team to fix the issue -- and they don't know how." Typically it's a start-up or a company where the CEO/founders are driving the technical decisions where you find IT using CentOS, PostgreSQL, etc without a support contract... and when there's enough revenue or investors buying that "throat to choke" is part of due diligence in a growing business.
filmgirlcw 8y ago
With regards to WordPress, it’s the lack of policing on the OSS-ness of a plug-in — as you mention — helps create a viable market, but many of the most successful plugin devs sell a premium version tied to a service in some way. Whether the service is necessary is often beside the point, the SaaS aspect can be used as a shield to obfuscate the open source code. I also think with WordPress in particular, the target customer doesn’t know how to compile the plugin source if they find it. It’s easier to pay than to figure out how to get it for free. Now, whole rings of people sharing premium themes and plugins exist, but the malware often added to those items can turn people off of that method. It’s easier to just buy it. Honestly, support seems to be the most long lasting option — see RHEL and Canonical and Oracle with their Linux distros. You can use centos instead of RHEL (and could before red hat took it over, for that matter), but you’d need to deal with the the problems yourself or have a person on staff to deal with them. Especially as stuff is more cloud-based,it’s easier to just have a support contract. The problem with this model for the indie developer, of course, is that the act of offering support has a cost too. Time, extra staff, logistics — and that can be harder to do than the closed-source perpetual license model, where you offer support but it’s understood the transaction is primarily for the software. And just speaking for myself, if I buy a piece of software, I’m not necessarily going to bug the dev every time something breaks b/c I was really buying the ability that use the software that would otherwise not be available to me. But if I am explicitly paying for support, I’m going to be more entitled, even if it’s for an OSS product. Because if I don’t get support and it’s OSS, why didn’t I just compile it myself and save money?
ghaff 8y ago
>- There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. (Naturally doesn't work with permissive licences. Requires a strong copyleft licence like the GPL). Red Hat doesn't dual-license and sells subscriptions (support, updates, backports, KnowledgeBase, etc.) for open source offerings that use a variety of different licenses including permissive ones (e.g. OpenStack).
justinclift 8y ago
This is kind of timely, as setting up a Patreon account is something we (DB Browser for SQLite / sqlitebrowser.org) did a few days ago: https://www.patreon.com/db4s https://www.patreon.com/db4s For us it's an initial experiment, as we had no idea at all if anyone would decide to become a Patron. However, it's um... 3 or 4 days since the account creation and already some people have become Patrons. Kind of nifty. :) Other people have been at it longer, and are definitely having a measure of success with it. For example, seeing Gina Häußge being able to work full time on OctoPrint gives us hope for the future. :) https://www.patreon.com/foosel https://www.patreon.com/foosel
justinclift 8y ago
> There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. This bit is confusing to me. AFAIK Red Hat doesn't use a dual-licensing approach. Is it something they've recently introduced?
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Redhat owns Centos if I recall correctly. Prior to that centos was just a rebuild of all the open source parts of redhats software.
  - justinclift 8y ago
    Yep, Red Hat (note - not "RedHat") does employ several of the core CentOS team these day, although it started out externally. > ... just a rebuild of all the open source parts of redhats software. That seems like super weird description of things. :) All of the Red Hat OS software is Open Source. The only significant pieces CentOS don't include are the Red Hat branding and artwork: https://www.centos.org/about/ https://www.centos.org/about/ As far a dual licensing goes... that doesn't seem related to this? :)
alexozer 8y ago
Interesting, that Fair Source License seems like the perfect example of how your software can simultaneously be open source software but not free software. It doesn't matter if it's open source if I can't modify it and deploy it to however many computers I want to.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Do you really expect people to pay for something when they can get it for free? Making software open source means you are either selling something complementary (hardware, other software, services) or else begging for crumbs.

mcny 8y ago
I don't know much about these things and I'm making this up as we go but I wonder if we can use AGPL or a stronger version of AGPL. Basically, you pay for a subscription or everything on your servers that touches this software must be free and open source. Should work for researchers and students and there is a continued revenue stream. For example, require any software that talks to a rest API also be foss. With more people paying, the subscription can slowly become cheaper and more accessible. Thoughts?
- tormeh 8y ago
  Many companies already do this. See Mobicents, which we use at my current job.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Thoughts? It depends. In my own business I decided open source 'customers' are more trouble than they are worth so I do very little. Just the fact that people are willing to pay for my software is a strong validation that I'm doing something useful and on the right course.

pjmlp 8y ago

As someone that was part of an effort to do this in the early .com days, it is a lost hope trying to sell open source software to consumers. While selling to enterprise can be made via consulting and training, most consumers just want a one time shot paying for their software. Well, if you do that with commercial software, usually the only way to avoid paying is piracy. In open source world, they can just go to another guy that is re-packaging your work and making it available for free, thus killing your source of income. Which is the major reason most desktop software shops are going the store model, hoping that higher control will prevent that kind of workaround (which doesn't work with rooted devices anyway), or forcing consumers to migrate to a SaaS like in the good old timesharing days. I might add that FOSS developers are the first to blame, as contrary to most professions, many go to great lenghts to avoid paying anything, while feeling entitled their costumers pay them. I am overgeneralizing here, but you see it every time someone comes up with licensing changes as means to be able to keep working on the product that they love, right away the forum gets flooded with free beer alternatives and vocal complaints how everyone is going to migrate to something else.

open-source-ux 8y ago
Yes, I agree with what you say. I actually think the dual-licencing model seems the most realistic for many developers who are selling to a business. Ironically, it's because a strong copyleft licence like the GPL is unattractive to many businesses that they naturally turn to the commercial licence which allows them to make changes they don't need to release publicly. I'm sympathetic to what Fair Source is trying to do, but even that garnered a lot of negative reaction among developers (at least if you read the discussion on Hacker News).
tormeh 8y ago
I don't think the primary problem is cost, but that when you build your product tightly coupled with a propretary product that is hard to migrate off of then the vendor of that product can shake you down, or they can go bankrupt or what have you. It makes your business vulnerable, and no one wants that. Also your production environment crashing because a license expired. Fun times.

mikece 8y ago

Let's look at your examples about Red Hat and GitLab. Managers pay for service contracts from those companies so they have a "throat to choke" if things go sideways so it's not simply their neck on the line. From a CIO's point of view, a service contract is an insurance policy against standing before the CEO or board and saying "I have nobody but myself to blame, I have nobody but my team to fix the issue -- and they don't know how." Typically it's a start-up or a company where the CEO/founders are driving the technical decisions where you find IT using CentOS, PostgreSQL, etc without a support contract... and when there's enough revenue or investors buying that "throat to choke" is part of due diligence in a growing business.

filmgirlcw 8y ago

With regards to WordPress, it’s the lack of policing on the OSS-ness of a plug-in — as you mention — helps create a viable market, but many of the most successful plugin devs sell a premium version tied to a service in some way. Whether the service is necessary is often beside the point, the SaaS aspect can be used as a shield to obfuscate the open source code. I also think with WordPress in particular, the target customer doesn’t know how to compile the plugin source if they find it. It’s easier to pay than to figure out how to get it for free. Now, whole rings of people sharing premium themes and plugins exist, but the malware often added to those items can turn people off of that method. It’s easier to just buy it. Honestly, support seems to be the most long lasting option — see RHEL and Canonical and Oracle with their Linux distros. You can use centos instead of RHEL (and could before red hat took it over, for that matter), but you’d need to deal with the the problems yourself or have a person on staff to deal with them. Especially as stuff is more cloud-based,it’s easier to just have a support contract. The problem with this model for the indie developer, of course, is that the act of offering support has a cost too. Time, extra staff, logistics — and that can be harder to do than the closed-source perpetual license model, where you offer support but it’s understood the transaction is primarily for the software. And just speaking for myself, if I buy a piece of software, I’m not necessarily going to bug the dev every time something breaks b/c I was really buying the ability that use the software that would otherwise not be available to me. But if I am explicitly paying for support, I’m going to be more entitled, even if it’s for an OSS product. Because if I don’t get support and it’s OSS, why didn’t I just compile it myself and save money?

ghaff 8y ago

>- There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. (Naturally doesn't work with permissive licences. Requires a strong copyleft licence like the GPL). Red Hat doesn't dual-license and sells subscriptions (support, updates, backports, KnowledgeBase, etc.) for open source offerings that use a variety of different licenses including permissive ones (e.g. OpenStack).

justinclift 8y ago

This is kind of timely, as setting up a Patreon account is something we (DB Browser for SQLite / sqlitebrowser.org) did a few days ago: https://www.patreon.com/db4s https://www.patreon.com/db4s For us it's an initial experiment, as we had no idea at all if anyone would decide to become a Patron. However, it's um... 3 or 4 days since the account creation and already some people have become Patrons. Kind of nifty. :) Other people have been at it longer, and are definitely having a measure of success with it. For example, seeing Gina Häußge being able to work full time on OctoPrint gives us hope for the future. :) https://www.patreon.com/foosel https://www.patreon.com/foosel

justinclift 8y ago

> There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. This bit is confusing to me. AFAIK Red Hat doesn't use a dual-licensing approach. Is it something they've recently introduced?

michaelmrose 8y ago
Redhat owns Centos if I recall correctly. Prior to that centos was just a rebuild of all the open source parts of redhats software.
- justinclift 8y ago
  Yep, Red Hat (note - not "RedHat") does employ several of the core CentOS team these day, although it started out externally. > ... just a rebuild of all the open source parts of redhats software. That seems like super weird description of things. :) All of the Red Hat OS software is Open Source. The only significant pieces CentOS don't include are the Red Hat branding and artwork: https://www.centos.org/about/ https://www.centos.org/about/ As far a dual licensing goes... that doesn't seem related to this? :)

alexozer 8y ago

Interesting, that Fair Source License seems like the perfect example of how your software can simultaneously be open source software but not free software. It doesn't matter if it's open source if I can't modify it and deploy it to however many computers I want to.