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>I won't dive too much in the details, but I had serious health issues this summer, and the dust is only starting to settle. This affected my ability to work on

>I won't dive too much in the details, but I had serious health issues this summer, and the dust is only starting to settle. This affected my ability to work on the project on more important scale than expected, and I haven't been able to achieve anything lately but the most basic tasks. We need to bring back the culture of small business charging for the software, and users paying for it. If your software is paid, your revenue generally scales with your user base, so you can go full time on the project, or even start hiring people to help you. Also, since your revenue comes directly from your users, you want to listen to their requests and align your software with them. You can't just release an overnight patch pissing most users off, because you will feel the monetary loss right away. Except, these days, people expect consumer software to be free. So it's either the naive founder driving themselves to a burnout, or one of the big companies monetizing it indirectly (by charging for their cloud platform, or via ads). Maintainers lose, users lose, corporations win.

yepthatsreality 6y ago
I agree, there should be more encouragement to pay for software. Getting more people to embrace this idea means we can move away from a freemium model on the wider Internet as well.
3np 6y ago
Many peoples minds seem to be stuck at either "charge and keep it closed source and heavily guarded" versus "FLOSS". There's nothing wrong with charging for free and open software if you'd otherwise be developing it purely based on donations to keep it open.
- frenchy 6y ago
  Part of the problem here though, is that many people don't want to pay for software if there is a free alternative, so market forces work such that anyone who tries to attempt such a thing often gets sidelined by someone else who releases their binaries for free.
  - oceanghost 6y ago
    At every (software) job I've ever had-- spending any sort of money was nearly impossible but I had free range to use open source software. Thus most of our tooling ended up being open source.
  - 3np 6y ago
    Well, I may want to support a project regardless but it's an easier sell to my manager with a "license" than a "donation"
- thih9 6y ago
  What are some examples of open source projects that follow this model?
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    FileZilla
  - bakakid 6y ago
    I think this one applies: Aseprite pixel art/animation editor. The source code is free to use on github, but if you dont know how to compile it, then they also sell it ready to go for most operating systems. as a student, i liked the idea of getting it for free, but couldnt figure out the compiling (im an illustrator/designer that dabbles in code, but not much at all) so i footed the ~$20 to be able to use it.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    ZynAddSubFX does iirc.
slx26 6y ago
I agree that we have too many people who add a lot of value to our society without getting much back, or easily become too burdened trying to manage something for which they do not have enough resources, even if they are actually getting something. What you say does make some sense, but I don't think the problem is that people is unwilling to pay, but rather that you don't want to pay until you actually determine that something is useful (and this is actually positive, as you would remove a lot of junk from the world that only looks fancy for the first 5 minutes), but afterwards paying is often too burdensome (because you already have it for free, you have to go to the donation page, have to decide how much money to donate, etc (yeah, all this seems absurd, but it is adding friction to the process, and this happens for so many software tools that we use in our day to day, that we just decide to ignore it)). To me, it seems like it would be better to have a fairness system, where you put some money limit per month, you can see which free software tools are you using (or bands are listening, or many others) and which ones could use some money, usage of each element is automatically monitored, and every month you pay automatically. You could specify how much money you make and get automatic feedback based on whether you are giving too little or too much for your use of those resources. I've seen multiple companies that have tried to do this "fairness" thing... but the most popular one is still patreon and that's too much manual work. There are many hard problems with this proposal, mostly how do you do the communication/monitoring of the elements you want to donate for and this system, and how you determine if what software developers / artists / whatever are asking for is fair or not (this is the really big one), but it doesn't seem so far fetched. What we all really want is a fair distribution of the rewards for our efforts. We have to solve this at some point, and the obstacles are friction, the previously mentioned determination of "reasonable compensation", and consensus on the tool to solve these two (which should be funded through itself).
floatingatoll 6y ago
Shareware had this right: Feature-restricted or time-limited demo; Pay to unlock; Pay for upgrades; Release fixes often and upgrades occasionally.
52-6F-62 6y ago
> Except, these days, people expect consumer software to be free And journalism, and music, and art, and...

yepthatsreality 6y ago

I agree, there should be more encouragement to pay for software. Getting more people to embrace this idea means we can move away from a freemium model on the wider Internet as well.

3np 6y ago

Many peoples minds seem to be stuck at either "charge and keep it closed source and heavily guarded" versus "FLOSS". There's nothing wrong with charging for free and open software if you'd otherwise be developing it purely based on donations to keep it open.

frenchy 6y ago
Part of the problem here though, is that many people don't want to pay for software if there is a free alternative, so market forces work such that anyone who tries to attempt such a thing often gets sidelined by someone else who releases their binaries for free.
- oceanghost 6y ago
  At every (software) job I've ever had-- spending any sort of money was nearly impossible but I had free range to use open source software. Thus most of our tooling ended up being open source.
- 3np 6y ago
  Well, I may want to support a project regardless but it's an easier sell to my manager with a "license" than a "donation"
thih9 6y ago
What are some examples of open source projects that follow this model?
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  FileZilla
- bakakid 6y ago
  I think this one applies: Aseprite pixel art/animation editor. The source code is free to use on github, but if you dont know how to compile it, then they also sell it ready to go for most operating systems. as a student, i liked the idea of getting it for free, but couldnt figure out the compiling (im an illustrator/designer that dabbles in code, but not much at all) so i footed the ~$20 to be able to use it.
- Shared404 6y ago
  ZynAddSubFX does iirc.

slx26 6y ago

I agree that we have too many people who add a lot of value to our society without getting much back, or easily become too burdened trying to manage something for which they do not have enough resources, even if they are actually getting something. What you say does make some sense, but I don't think the problem is that people is unwilling to pay, but rather that you don't want to pay until you actually determine that something is useful (and this is actually positive, as you would remove a lot of junk from the world that only looks fancy for the first 5 minutes), but afterwards paying is often too burdensome (because you already have it for free, you have to go to the donation page, have to decide how much money to donate, etc (yeah, all this seems absurd, but it is adding friction to the process, and this happens for so many software tools that we use in our day to day, that we just decide to ignore it)). To me, it seems like it would be better to have a fairness system, where you put some money limit per month, you can see which free software tools are you using (or bands are listening, or many others) and which ones could use some money, usage of each element is automatically monitored, and every month you pay automatically. You could specify how much money you make and get automatic feedback based on whether you are giving too little or too much for your use of those resources. I've seen multiple companies that have tried to do this "fairness" thing... but the most popular one is still patreon and that's too much manual work. There are many hard problems with this proposal, mostly how do you do the communication/monitoring of the elements you want to donate for and this system, and how you determine if what software developers / artists / whatever are asking for is fair or not (this is the really big one), but it doesn't seem so far fetched. What we all really want is a fair distribution of the rewards for our efforts. We have to solve this at some point, and the obstacles are friction, the previously mentioned determination of "reasonable compensation", and consensus on the tool to solve these two (which should be funded through itself).

floatingatoll 6y ago

Shareware had this right: Feature-restricted or time-limited demo; Pay to unlock; Pay for upgrades; Release fixes often and upgrades occasionally.

52-6F-62 6y ago

> Except, these days, people expect consumer software to be free And journalism, and music, and art, and...