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I've been thinking about this for some time and I agree with the gist of the article. Most OSS that comes out: 1. Either funded by giant megacorps because the

I've been thinking about this for some time and I agree with the gist of the article. Most OSS that comes out: 1. Either funded by giant megacorps because they're trying to commoditize their competitor's edge: See kubernetes, LLVM etc. 2. Common frameworks that people sell consulting around. This is tricky because if your software is easy enough for consumers to use, they won't have use for your consulting. This leads to this bad incentive of complicating software where not necessary. See: Pivotal selling consulting around Spring and Redhat etc. 3. Anything that doesn't fit in #1 or #2 above is mostly not possible with OSS. To think about it, we can just examine the most consumer facing software that we use. Where is a OSS developed messenger app that is as popular as Facebook or Hangouts? 20 years back, we had OSS for most consumer facing software, Unix coreutils etc. Basically, today OSS is reduced to professional frameworks and middleware libraries because that is beneficial to megacorps and they fund this kind of software, but OSS by indie developers is pretty much dead.

octorian 8y ago
> but OSS by indie developers is pretty much dead I have never seen a viable "business model" around F/OSS end-user application software. Every time I ask the F/OSS fanboys for this, they either come up short or ramble about "selling support." The closest I've even considered was the OpenBSD model, where you keep everything free and open, but sell the "official distribution." The modern app store ecosystem actually improves the viability of this. However, that approach probably has a lot of limitations. That being said, I prefer to open-source anything I do that I don't intend to make money off of. I personally despise the "closed-source free-as-in-beer" model that some indie non-Linux developers seem to opt for.
- fuller00 8y ago
  One of the most intriguing models to fund OSS that I've seen lately is ICOs. The only downside to it being that it fits a narrow band of software which can have a marketplace. So if you're developing the next coreutils "ls", I doubt you could fund it with an ICO. Another model is that of sqlite, where the core code is open but unit tests aren't available. In effect, this is somewhat similar to selling consulting but with fewer chances of you having to complicate your software. At the end of the day, what's important is that the base computing be available in an OSS fashion. Base Computing = Decent OS with GUI + An App store. I think that's the direction Canonical should be going in and attempt to make money by hosting an App store for Ubuntu, just like Google makes money off PlayStore.

octorian 8y ago

> but OSS by indie developers is pretty much dead I have never seen a viable "business model" around F/OSS end-user application software. Every time I ask the F/OSS fanboys for this, they either come up short or ramble about "selling support." The closest I've even considered was the OpenBSD model, where you keep everything free and open, but sell the "official distribution." The modern app store ecosystem actually improves the viability of this. However, that approach probably has a lot of limitations. That being said, I prefer to open-source anything I do that I don't intend to make money off of. I personally despise the "closed-source free-as-in-beer" model that some indie non-Linux developers seem to opt for.

fuller00 8y ago
One of the most intriguing models to fund OSS that I've seen lately is ICOs. The only downside to it being that it fits a narrow band of software which can have a marketplace. So if you're developing the next coreutils "ls", I doubt you could fund it with an ICO. Another model is that of sqlite, where the core code is open but unit tests aren't available. In effect, this is somewhat similar to selling consulting but with fewer chances of you having to complicate your software. At the end of the day, what's important is that the base computing be available in an OSS fashion. Base Computing = Decent OS with GUI + An App store. I think that's the direction Canonical should be going in and attempt to make money by hosting an App store for Ubuntu, just like Google makes money off PlayStore.