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The article is talking about businesses being on Open Source foundations, not the myriad of other possible Open Source projects. In that context profit is what
by bruce511 3y ago
The article is talking about businesses being on Open Source foundations, not the myriad of other possible Open Source projects.
In that context profit is what's left once revenue is received and expenses paid.
Implicit in those expenses are (fixed) salaries, employee contracts, payslips and so on.
What a business does with the profit can be varied. Firstly it can be added to cash reserves, which can contine to pay expenses through poor-revenue months. It might be spent on assets, like new hardware. It might allow for another hire. In some cases, although less often than you might think, it pays out dividends to owners.
You don't mention too many details, so I can only presume your situation. I suspect it's a different kind of setup. If you are man-alone, and the project is small, (ie you have no desire or need to add a employee) then basically the revenue is just income to you. Some months you get more, some months you get less. In this context there isn't "profit" but revenue. This is especially possible for software where other overheads are trivial and the effort of tracking expenses for tax purposes meaningless. You may not even keep a set of books.
If you are indeed in this space, then I understand why the article feels unrelateable. It's discussing a very different situation.
As with all articles of this nature, context is important.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoTFA said: > To be clear, I’m talking about open-source projects that compete with popular paid solutions. [ ... ] > Excluding non-profit projects that are sponsored by donations or parent organizations, a typical open-source business needs profit to be the ultimate north star. So, I think you've somewhat misinterpreted the space the author thinks they are referring to. Ardour is a small project in terms of man-power - 2 full time paid developers, other individuals paid for media and other work, various commercial collaborations along the way, certainly dreaming of being able to use more paid development hours. We absolutely compete with at least a dozen popular paid solutions, with at least 3 on Linux alone. The main reasons I think this article feels so unrelatable to me is (a) it's strange focus on profit (b) it's web/SaaS centric nature (c) it's B2B centric nature. It just doesn't have much to say about the "space" of writing native/desktop applications for individuals involved in creation workflows, free of VC influence.
- jacquesm 3y agoHi Paul, I've been a long time user of Ardour and would love to send some bread your way, but I'm absolutely allergic to Paypal, is there a way for EU users to send you funds directly via SEPA or something like that?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoSorry, there's no way for us to interface with SEPA at this time. It would not be that hard to setup a way to just receive money via SEPA (probably using Wise's multicurrency account system), but integrating it into the rest of our payment system would be gigantic, because of the totally different interaction model inherent in SEPA-based transactions (i.e. a bank would have to notify us of a payment). While I'd love to do this as a matter of principle, we think it better for our users that we focus more on features and bugs in the software. We explain why we use PayPal over here: https://ardour.org/faq.html#why-paypal https://ardour.org/faq.html#why-paypal People complain a lot about PayPal (especially on HN), but I have yet to see a viable alternative especially given (a) my status as a US citizen (which makes it harder to bank elsewhere (b) micropayment fee structure (PayPal is unique in offering something that makes $1 payments somewhat viable (saving around $0.25 per transaction, and there are LOT of them). The other well-known payment processors do not have the footprint nor the features that PayPal offers.