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Foss desktop software is so hard to monetize. At least with servers you can charge for cloud features (though then the user has given up some control in that sc

Foss desktop software is so hard to monetize. At least with servers you can charge for cloud features (though then the user has given up some control in that scenario). Industry associations seem to help, like the Linux foundation, where company stakeholders come together to fund the development and get a say in its direction - eg, if the different cloud providers banded together to fork mongo and/or redis in this way (to the unfortunate and severe detriment of the founders) Possibly purism is pioneering a hardware driven angle too?

alien_ 8y ago
The incentives if you sell support is to make your software harder to use, design it poorly so that it breaks and people need you to rescue them when something bad happens, or simply deliver security patches timely. The first two and are against my principles and the latter simply doesn't apply unless you're a behemoth like RedHat or likely insecure or mission-critical so if breaches do happen it's a very big deal. My particular project is designed to run in AWS and help reduce my users' bills. I spent a lot of time and effort to make it as easy to install as possible and to minimize friction, runtime costs and security risks for my users (it's entirely serverless based on Lambda and can be installed in minutes). The side effects of these decisions are that it's so stable,secure and easy to use that pretty much nobody really needs any help with it, and that it is quite unlikely to break in the future by itself(although I see it break from time to time because AWS often changes some things that I depend on but I usually address these quickly as well), so getting a support plan doesn't make so much sense. I mainly get these support plans sold to a handful of very enthusiastic users who would otherwise donate much smaller amounts. I tried to bundle these with a guarantee that the supported code is thoroughly tested while the trunk is best effort, but that doesn't seem to work yet.
diffeomorphism 8y ago
I think that this is in large part due to hurdles of paying for software easily. For example https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov.freebVNC&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov.... and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov.bVNC&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov.... are the same GPL licensed software either gratis or for $5. Just buying it via the store is straightforward instead of figuring out where the homepage is, finding a donate button, entering credit card details... . Having more non-gratis but free software would be a good thing https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
- alien_ 8y ago
  That's actually a great idea, thanks for sharing it! I'll try to make it paid from the mobile phone.

alien_ 8y ago

The incentives if you sell support is to make your software harder to use, design it poorly so that it breaks and people need you to rescue them when something bad happens, or simply deliver security patches timely. The first two and are against my principles and the latter simply doesn't apply unless you're a behemoth like RedHat or likely insecure or mission-critical so if breaches do happen it's a very big deal. My particular project is designed to run in AWS and help reduce my users' bills. I spent a lot of time and effort to make it as easy to install as possible and to minimize friction, runtime costs and security risks for my users (it's entirely serverless based on Lambda and can be installed in minutes). The side effects of these decisions are that it's so stable,secure and easy to use that pretty much nobody really needs any help with it, and that it is quite unlikely to break in the future by itself(although I see it break from time to time because AWS often changes some things that I depend on but I usually address these quickly as well), so getting a support plan doesn't make so much sense. I mainly get these support plans sold to a handful of very enthusiastic users who would otherwise donate much smaller amounts. I tried to bundle these with a guarantee that the supported code is thoroughly tested while the trunk is best effort, but that doesn't seem to work yet.

diffeomorphism 8y ago

I think that this is in large part due to hurdles of paying for software easily. For example https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov.freebVNC&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov.... and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov.bVNC&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov.... are the same GPL licensed software either gratis or for $5. Just buying it via the store is straightforward instead of figuring out where the homepage is, finding a donate button, entering credit card details... . Having more non-gratis but free software would be a good thing https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

alien_ 8y ago
That's actually a great idea, thanks for sharing it! I'll try to make it paid from the mobile phone.