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If Paul Davis is around, I'd be interesting in hearing their take on the subject given their experience with Ardour (which is open-source GPL, but official bina

If Paul Davis is around, I'd be interesting in hearing their take on the subject given their experience with Ardour (which is open-source GPL, but official binaries cost money). As far as I know, Ardour has done this for at least a decade, so I assume it's been reasonably successful. Edit: it occurs to me that Paul is probably asked about this frequently, and maybe has already said some words about this, so any relevant links would be useful too

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
He's around though! No particularly good links, and your summary almost says it all anyway. When I started working on Ardour, I didn't need to make any money from it. By 2009, it started to seem clear that I did, and fortunately Radiohead had just released "In Rainbows" using their "pay tunnel" approach (can't get it unless you pay but what you pay is up to you). I wasn't a Radiohead fan but I thought there was something interesting in the idea. Ardour has remained GPL (v2+) licensed, so the current situation is this: * you can get the source without charge (github or our own tarball) * if you want a prebuilt binary, we ask you to pay something (any amount above US$1) We set the "default" price (the one in the price box, that can be edited) based on your IP address and OECD data about the cost of a mid-priced meal for 2 without alcohol in (roughly) your (apparent) location. We also added subscriptions, not like Adobe etc., but just regular periodic payments, mostly because they help smooth out the income flow between releases. They are available at the US$1, 4 and 10 per month, to try to cater to the wide variety of incomes worldwide. There's a huge churn in Windows-based subscribers (e.g. 10 cancellations a day, 10 new ones). You get free upgrades as long as your subscription is active (and obviously for a GPL project, there are no other consequences to it ending - the software keeps working as ever). We have on the order of 6000 subscribers these days (with the aforementioned high rate of churn). Linux distributions are obviously free to distribute it as they wish. There are one or two resellers on ebay etc. also, who I just try to ignore. During COVID our total monthly revenue grew as high as US$20k/month, and have settled back to about US$17k/month. The income is divided between two full time developers (I'm one of them) and we've built an "escrow" account of more than US$60k over the last two years. Some of this currently being used to pay someone I discovered on HN to rebuild our website, and we hope to pay for more development work next year. AFAIK, we are one of the most successful "user-funded" GPL projects in the world. Blender has way more revenue, but AFAICT, most of it is not from users.
- tomcam 5y ago
  Well that scratched a lot of itches. Thank you very much for a wonderful Christmas present.
- jabl 5y ago
  I think Krita (a painting app) does something very similar. Source is freely available under the GPL, but they sell binaries on the windows and macos app stores. It's not a photoshop sized business, but apparently pays for a couple full time developers.
- jlokier 5y ago
  > We set the "default" price (the one in the price box, that can be edited) based on your IP address and OECD data about the cost of a mid-priced meal for 2 without alcohol in (roughly) your (apparent) location. Nice idea. Which data source do you use for that?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/ https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

He's around though! No particularly good links, and your summary almost says it all anyway. When I started working on Ardour, I didn't need to make any money from it. By 2009, it started to seem clear that I did, and fortunately Radiohead had just released "In Rainbows" using their "pay tunnel" approach (can't get it unless you pay but what you pay is up to you). I wasn't a Radiohead fan but I thought there was something interesting in the idea. Ardour has remained GPL (v2+) licensed, so the current situation is this: * you can get the source without charge (github or our own tarball) * if you want a prebuilt binary, we ask you to pay something (any amount above US$1) We set the "default" price (the one in the price box, that can be edited) based on your IP address and OECD data about the cost of a mid-priced meal for 2 without alcohol in (roughly) your (apparent) location. We also added subscriptions, not like Adobe etc., but just regular periodic payments, mostly because they help smooth out the income flow between releases. They are available at the US$1, 4 and 10 per month, to try to cater to the wide variety of incomes worldwide. There's a huge churn in Windows-based subscribers (e.g. 10 cancellations a day, 10 new ones). You get free upgrades as long as your subscription is active (and obviously for a GPL project, there are no other consequences to it ending - the software keeps working as ever). We have on the order of 6000 subscribers these days (with the aforementioned high rate of churn). Linux distributions are obviously free to distribute it as they wish. There are one or two resellers on ebay etc. also, who I just try to ignore. During COVID our total monthly revenue grew as high as US$20k/month, and have settled back to about US$17k/month. The income is divided between two full time developers (I'm one of them) and we've built an "escrow" account of more than US$60k over the last two years. Some of this currently being used to pay someone I discovered on HN to rebuild our website, and we hope to pay for more development work next year. AFAIK, we are one of the most successful "user-funded" GPL projects in the world. Blender has way more revenue, but AFAICT, most of it is not from users.

tomcam 5y ago
Well that scratched a lot of itches. Thank you very much for a wonderful Christmas present.
jabl 5y ago
I think Krita (a painting app) does something very similar. Source is freely available under the GPL, but they sell binaries on the windows and macos app stores. It's not a photoshop sized business, but apparently pays for a couple full time developers.
jlokier 5y ago
> We set the "default" price (the one in the price box, that can be edited) based on your IP address and OECD data about the cost of a mid-priced meal for 2 without alcohol in (roughly) your (apparent) location. Nice idea. Which data source do you use for that?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/ https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/