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One issue is that donations implicitly promote a cost-plus pricing model (I'd like to earn 10k a year doing open source, so that's how many donations I need to

One issue is that donations implicitly promote a cost-plus pricing model (I'd like to earn 10k a year doing open source, so that's how many donations I need to fund me working on this). Whereas something like dual-licensing promotes a value-based pricing model (our fortune 500 doesn't need to pay 5 engineers for a year to build and maintain this distributed system; we would happily pay equivalent of an engineer per year for that.)

stormbeard 6y ago
Then you're just indirectly donating money, no? What you described is just proxying the donation through an engineer.
hobofan 6y ago
What's the problem with a cost-plus pricing model? Having a solid ecosystem of cost-plus priced open source software would already be a great step up from the status quo.
- Robin_Message 6y ago
  No problem per-se, but to give a simple example: Suppose a developer, let's call him Salvatore, lives in a modest apartment in, say Italy, and would live very comfortably indeed on three hundred thousand euros a year. And let's say three cloud providers, call them, Jungle, Blue, and Lots, agree to give Salvatore a hundred thousand a year each to keep developing a, I don't know, a high-performance in-memory database. Lucky Salvatore, plenty of money for doing what he loves anyway. Let's say that this database is quite good, and Jungle, Blue, and Lots each make a cool hundred million a year in pure profit renting out instances that run Salvatore's code. So, whilst Salvatore has done perhaps better with the cost-plus model than he was before, he is capturing just 0.1% of the economic surplus that is being generated by his code. And that is the problem in this scenario: if all elements of the value chain are cost-plus except one, that one element captures all of the surplus even though it may not be deserved.
  - treis 6y ago
    The problem with this is that Redis isn't used because it is particularly good. It's used because everyone else uses it. And everyone else uses it because it's free. If you tried to charge for Redis then "everyone else" would stop using it and pretty much all of the value disappears. It becomes a niche product that you shouldn't build on. You're vulnerable to high license fees and experienced developers become harder to find since few get experience with it.
    - jiofih 6y ago
      You couldn’t be more out of touch with reality.
      - treis 6y ago
        Ok, name one building block type piece of software that isn't open source and is a market leader.
        jiofih 6y ago
        I meant you’re wrong about Redis. It was in a unique position for a long time, if you pulled it out there would be nothing to really replace it. RedisLabs does charge for redis (extensions, and support) and seems to be doing pretty damn well for the matter.
        treis 6y ago
        >meant you’re wrong about Redis. It was in a unique position for a long time, if you pulled it out there would be nothing to really replace it. You haven't really said where I was wrong. >RedisLabs does charge for redis (extensions, and support) and seems to be doing pretty damn well for the matter. Charging for extras is not the same thing as charging for the product.
        jiofih 6y ago

stormbeard 6y ago

Then you're just indirectly donating money, no? What you described is just proxying the donation through an engineer.

hobofan 6y ago

What's the problem with a cost-plus pricing model? Having a solid ecosystem of cost-plus priced open source software would already be a great step up from the status quo.

Robin_Message 6y ago
No problem per-se, but to give a simple example: Suppose a developer, let's call him Salvatore, lives in a modest apartment in, say Italy, and would live very comfortably indeed on three hundred thousand euros a year. And let's say three cloud providers, call them, Jungle, Blue, and Lots, agree to give Salvatore a hundred thousand a year each to keep developing a, I don't know, a high-performance in-memory database. Lucky Salvatore, plenty of money for doing what he loves anyway. Let's say that this database is quite good, and Jungle, Blue, and Lots each make a cool hundred million a year in pure profit renting out instances that run Salvatore's code. So, whilst Salvatore has done perhaps better with the cost-plus model than he was before, he is capturing just 0.1% of the economic surplus that is being generated by his code. And that is the problem in this scenario: if all elements of the value chain are cost-plus except one, that one element captures all of the surplus even though it may not be deserved.
- treis 6y ago
  The problem with this is that Redis isn't used because it is particularly good. It's used because everyone else uses it. And everyone else uses it because it's free. If you tried to charge for Redis then "everyone else" would stop using it and pretty much all of the value disappears. It becomes a niche product that you shouldn't build on. You're vulnerable to high license fees and experienced developers become harder to find since few get experience with it.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    You couldn’t be more out of touch with reality.
    - treis 6y ago
      Ok, name one building block type piece of software that isn't open source and is a market leader.
      - jiofih 6y ago
        I meant you’re wrong about Redis. It was in a unique position for a long time, if you pulled it out there would be nothing to really replace it. RedisLabs does charge for redis (extensions, and support) and seems to be doing pretty damn well for the matter.
        treis 6y ago
        >meant you’re wrong about Redis. It was in a unique position for a long time, if you pulled it out there would be nothing to really replace it. You haven't really said where I was wrong. >RedisLabs does charge for redis (extensions, and support) and seems to be doing pretty damn well for the matter. Charging for extras is not the same thing as charging for the product.
        jiofih 6y ago