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Maintenance is a really good point, but we haven’t found a way to monetize it. If I gave my software as OSS to paid customers, I’d immediately lose most of my
by laurent92 6y ago
Maintenance is a really good point, but we haven’t found a way to monetize it.
If I gave my software as OSS to paid customers, I’d immediately lose most of my other sales and give my little implementation secrets to my competitors.
I’d like to be able to say “And for +15%, get the source and ability to compile and fix forever”. And not lose my business in the process.
- bombcar 6y agoYou don’t have to use a true open source license- simply a “shared source” or something with a clause making it BSD when the business ceases operations or similar.
- laurent92 6y agoBut then, my customer has an interest in making me go out of business.
- kevincox 6y agoI doubt it. If you are providing a valuable service it is most likely the the customers interest to keep you alive and maintaining the software, especially since you are likely pooling the funds from a large number of companies. If you go out of business the customers will need to quickly figure out how to maintain the thing themselves, and I would expect that most companies won't "give back" so the cost on each user probably goes up.
- kevincox 6y ago> business ceases operations This is far too specific. What if they try to 10x the price on the next contract renewal. Or change the terms dramatically such that it is no longer suitable for our use case. I would want to have some sort of shared source agreement but that is still more restrictive than FOSS as the community can't work together to maintain it, so 100% of the burden of updates and maintenance falls upon us. But even this is wildly better than just loosing access (or being forced to pay).