14 ms·

I turned my open-source project into a full-time business

663 points by andris9 3y ago

sh79 3y ago
The title is misleading. The author changed their open source project into a commercial product with source available. It's not a business built around an open source project as the title implies, it's a license switch.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> I re-designed the UI of the app to look more professional and implemented a license key system. From that moment if you wanted to use EmailEngine (the new name for IMAP API), you needed a license key that was only available for paying subscribers. I also changed the license from LGPL to a commercial license. The source code is still published publicly on GitHub. It is no longer open-source by definition but source-available. This change of license was only possible due to requiring outside committers to sign a CLA from the start. This is the key portion. The open source project was turned into a commercial source available library with a license key. I am glad this has worked well for the developer who now has a decent income for all the hard work put into this library.
- quaintdev 3y ago
  So what prevents someone from bypassing the license check and run the version of application locally?
  - m12k 3y ago
    Probably fear that this is the kind of red flag that would show up in due diligence, and that having piracy as part of the foundation of the tech stack that you build your business on is not a worthwhile risk to take.
  - evgpbfhnr 3y ago
    Honesty? (haha) More seriously: - you get support by paying, this is important for many businesses - $1k/year is cheap - risk of getting sued if the word gets out you're using something against its license (and for network-facing code, I'd suspect it's easy enough to miss something) For me the advantage of source-available is you can always shortcut the support if there's a business critical problem and you can't wait for the author to wake up, so I think it's a great model.
    - simmons 3y ago
      I'm curious how much time a solo dev spends on support for a project like this. I can imagine some companies asking for a tremendous amount of support, or even trying to somehow get free consultation on adjacent concerns that aren't totally related to the product. Maybe it's just a matter of setting clear boundaries and limiting time?
      - andris9 3y ago
        I do support once a day for about an hour. I do monitor notifications for support emails during the day to react faster for urgent issues but there rarely is anything urgent. I guess the self-hosting side keeps support demand lower - if you are already capable of installing and running that software you can probably figure most of your issues out yourself.
  - andris9 3y ago
    Most EmailEngine's customers are small-ish SaaS providers (different kinds of niche CRMs, etc), and in their position, it is not really an option to spend time / risk breaking copyright protections. Instead, they pay the subscription fee and get into building email integration features for their service. TBH, I wouldn't dare to use such a model in the B2C market, though. Everyone would pirate it.
    - RyanHamilton 3y ago
      For niche applications, it's not that terrible. I've produced an SQL IDE for years with a license key that sold <=100 individual purchases per year. I've only spoken to one person I believed pirated it. I've now went the opposite direction and made it free.
      - MattJ100 3y ago
        What led you to making it free?
      - password4321 3y ago
        Nice! https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/ https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/
  - meigwilym 3y ago
    Updates, support and no losing developer time to updates and support. Sub $1k is a bargain for something so integral.
- graemep 3y ago
  > I am glad this has worked well for the developer who now has a decent income for all the hard work put into this library. it is also why people are reluctant to sign CLAs.
  - KingMob 3y ago
    It's a sad irony that CLAs essentially put the project owner in the exact same position as the unicorn that screwed them over, by screwing over those downstream who make contributions, if/when they monetize the project. I came across some Scheme/Racket/? library recently that attempts to quantify contribution levels and distribute any received funds fairly based on that. Unfortunately, I can't find it at the moment, but it was a cool idea.
    - soegaard 3y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xnppM6GG9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xnppM6GG9Q
      - KingMob 3y ago
        YES! That's what I was looking for! Thank you!
    - KingMob 3y ago
      Someone shared what I was looking for! It's called Attribution-Based Economics, it pays out to all contributors based on some measure of relative contribution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xnppM6GG9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xnppM6GG9Q https://drym.org/attribution-based-economics-for-open-source/ https://drym.org/attribution-based-economics-for-open-source...
    - andris9 3y ago
      You mean I screwed over those 0.1% of commits in EmailEngine (because the other 0.1% is from the Github Actions bot writing the changelog)? Everything else is my own code. For over 14 years, I've been actively developing Nodemailer, a hugely popular project. There has been no CLA in place, and the main outside commits I get are typo fixes during Hacktoberfest. This is why I'm still the owner of 98% of the committed code in Nodemailer. Usually, if I do not fix or build something, no one else will either.
- sam_goody 3y ago
  > I am glad this has worked well for the developer who now has a decent income for all the hard work put into this library. Isn't this a rug-pull? Open source project which others havecontributed to, and whose reputation was earned by nature of being open source. Than, after you have users, switch to proprietary. Sounds bad to me, but maybe I didn't fully understand? BTW, Apple used to have a thing with Darwin server where you could disable the license check legally, but only a hacker would do that. Companies still paid for the software. That sounds like a better solution, IMO - at least for those that are two small to pay but growing by the seat of their pants can still use and promote the software.
  - MattJ100 3y ago
    The main reason CLAs exist is to facilitate this kind of "rug pull", so I think the lesson is to either accept that it will happen or never sign a CLA.
727564797069706 3y ago
This is great stuff, thank you for sharing and congratulations! Looking to do something similar in terms of offering better, paid alternatives to the existing solutions out there in a source-available fashion. Anyone here experiencing trouble with tools you'd terribly want someone to improve?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ponector 3y ago
  We are struggling with TestRail. Barely usable expensive crap. Enterprise business love such things.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
evgpbfhnr 3y ago
For anyone else wondering about the license, it's standard signing with an ec (sect239k1) key https://github.com/postalsys/emailengine/blob/master/lib/tools.js#L605 https://github.com/postalsys/emailengine/blob/master/lib/too... So the author can just write whatever validity date/license details (apparently hostname etc), sign it and give that to their customers.
- daemin 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on this, not necessarily the code itself, but about signing and "an ec". I'm new to this and will be wanting to provide licences for software in the future.
  - scosman 3y ago
    Ecliptic curve signing. You can produce a message body like “valid_until=2025-02-25” then sign it and distribute it as an api key that’s body+sig. Client can verify signature using public key without a server call (sig validation). EC beats other signatures because signature is muuuuuch shorter, so it can still look like an API key.
  - evgpbfhnr 3y ago
    "an ec key" (elliptic curve) is just a detail, this can be done with any crypto library or utility - for example directly with the openssl command: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15686821/generate-ec-keypair-from-openssl-command-line/51179147#51179147 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15686821/generate-ec-key... embed the public part in your application and you can verify that something signed with the 'dgst' command and the private key really has been signed with the private key (which you obviously shouldn't publish) (Note if using plain commands there is more friendly than openssl, minify/signify are much harder to get wrong, but I'm not sure they're as easy to use programmatically in as many languages there are for libcrypto/sodium/etc; this is really just an example)
  - semireg 3y ago
    I use jwt for my app’s licensing. It works great.
carlossouza 3y ago
> The only regret I have is that I did not start selling my software earlier and only published free, open-source software. Well… better late than never. Congrats!
ThePhysicist 3y ago
Good for him! That's my experience with open-source software as well, if something is free, companies will almost never pay for it even if they get a ton of value out of it. On the other hand, if it's only a small amount e.g. 1,000 USD per year most companies let developers purchase that without much paperwork, so for these kind of tools such pricing is a sweetspot. If you go into enterprise sales territory things become way more complex and your sales cycles longer. For a solo founder that doesn't need to hyperscale this pricing scheme seems perfect.
- alex_suzuki 3y ago
  Agree. Developers seriously underestimate the amount of paperwork and organizational gymnastics larger companies require to buy literally anything. They won't be not buying your product because it's too expensive, but because it's just too much of a hassle. At that point, price is less of a factor than some people think.
  - haolez 3y ago
    Does marketplaces like the one at AWS help with that? I can pay with my AWS billing account. Sounds like another type of sweet spot.
    - playingalong 3y ago
      In principle that should work great. In practice I don't think it's working. Not sure why.
    - playingalong 3y ago
      In principle that should work great. In practice I don't think it's working. Not sure why.
    - Valien 3y ago
      It can help for sure. Especially if a company has an EDP or PPA with Amazon. The process to become an ISV on AWS takes a bit of work though.
hyperthesis 3y ago
Next, I started to increase the pricing; 250€ became 495€, then 695€ and 795€, and finally 895€. To my surprise, it did not mean getting fewer customers. I guess any sub-$1k amount for businesses is peanuts, so the only thing these price increases changed was improving the revenue. Open sourcers identify with users, but businesses getting a ROI are unlike consumers.
ergonaught 3y ago
> In any case, it changed years later when a startup using Nodemailer was acquired for half a billion dollars. I was financially not in a good place back then, and when I saw the news, I started to wonder – what did I get out of this? This is the root of most things like the BSL. You create an open source project or product, and companies with billions in quarterly revenue build the core of their business on your software, and meanwhile won't contribute to your ongoing viability (nevermind actual success) even in amounts that are entirely trivial for them. Toss the cloud providers into it now and it's even uglier.
- graemep 3y ago
  I get that, but the author did not try something like the BSL, just went to a fairly typical proprietary license. Even the right open source license, such as the AGPL, would probably have worked well, with the proprietary license as an option (in the same way he tried LGPL + MIT).
  - kijin 3y ago
    Well, one of OP's initial mistakes was that he thought LGPL was anywhere near "copyleft." It isn't. For SaaS companies who just want to use the software on their backend and are not interested in redistributing it in any way, there's no realistic difference between LGPL and more permissive licenses like MIT and BSD.
    - graemep 3y ago
      It looks like I was wrong. From the code he did use the AGPL. I am confused as to why the article says LGPL. Typo? Tried both?
      - andris9 3y ago
        It was a typo/mixup. Correct is AGPL, not LGPL as in the article.
- le-mark 3y ago
satvikpendem 3y ago
Interesting, I actually was making a competitor to Email Engine but also open source, similar to Nylas, because I didn't like the latter's opaque pricing and I didn't like the former's self-hosting, I wanted it to be in the cloud. I even got a YC interview based on this idea for last summer's batch (rejected primarily for being a solo founder, they seem to like solo founders only if they had a previous exit), but ultimately I gave up on the project because I realized I didn't actually like the problem space, it seemed too boring for me after a while and I wanted to concentrate on building things I thought were interesting.
j1elo 3y ago
Well, Open source is NOT a business model (and your business will fail if you think that it is) https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2018/08/24/open-source-is-not-a-business-model-and-your-business-will-fail-if-you-think-that-it-is/ https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2018/08/24/open-source-... Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26602316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26602316
- jraph 3y ago
  What should we take away from your comment? Sure, open source is not a business model, it defines a set of software programs that respect some rules: the OSD [1]. But you can certainly have a business model around open source software. [1] https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
  - Veuxdo 3y ago
    Consider the OP's headline. They didn't even describe what their project was. All they said, all they think they needed to say, was that it is Open Source. And on HN, it's actually true. Open Source projects get lots of kudos here. The problem is, others may see what is essentially a marketing strategy aimed at a niche audience and conclude that Open Source is an essential, in fact they most essential, part of the business. Hence the need to remind people that Open Source is not a business model.
    - jraph 3y ago
      I consider at some point running my own open source business. It must be around an idea that will speak to me at the time if it ever happens, but the open source part is important to me for ethical reasons. I'm not interested in running a software business if it's not open source. And so I'm interested in reading others about their business experiences around open source. What is their actual project is important since it has consequences on how the business will be run, but the exact project won't matter too much to me as a reader and it does not really matter to me if it doesn't appear in the title, I will click. Now the headline is a bit disappointing since the article is really "How I didn't keep doing open source when I turned my project into a business".
Havoc 3y ago
What sort of billing platform do people use for this sort of stuff?
- andris9 3y ago
  I use a self-built web page (a simple Express.js app), that uses Stripe and Stripe’s customer portal for the subscription management.
- alex_suzuki 3y ago
  Paddle, Lemon Squeezy and Fastspring are popular choices for Merchants of Record. These are basically distributors that sell your software in their name and take on the liability of filing taxes correctly. Stripe for people who don't care about taxes or are large enough to have an accountant do it for them.
  - Havoc 3y ago
    Thanks for the detailed response. Didn’t know the merchant of record thing exists. That’s neat
  - jokethrowaway 3y ago
    Accountants can charge a fair bit to handle N transactions so it may be cheaper to pay a MoR 5% instead of 3% for Stripe and pay your accountant extra. All the EU makers I know are using some sort of MoR. Stripe is still very popular in USA for makers who sell to USA, as sales taxes have tresholds; unless you sell a lot from an individual state, you don't have to worry about it. VATMOSS in Europe (the regulation which drove all the small sellers I know to drop their ecommerce websites and move to Amazon - talk about regulation to protect the people and damage Big Business!) doesn't have tresholds and you need a massive up to date VAT list + storing proof of user residing somewhere.
mogoh 3y ago
> How I turned my open-source project into a business > I also changed the license from LGPL to a commercial license. OK ...
- StevenXC 3y ago
  They didn't make a business using an open source project; they turned their open source project into a monetized non open source project.
  - zepolen 3y ago
    That's not how that works: > Derivatives works (including modifications or anything statically linked to the library) can only be redistributed under LGPL
    - jowea 3y ago
      LGPL does not bind the author(s) of the software in this way. And since there was a CLA the other authors authorized the main dev to change the license.
      - josebama 3y ago
        Thank you! This is the piece of information I was missing. I kept wondering as I read the article whether that was a LGPL license breach. Thanks for clarifying
        throwaway11460 3y ago
        As the owner of the intellectual property you're the one licensing to others. License is a kind of contract. You're not under any license yourself, it's yours. If you accepted PRs without a contributor agreement transferring the ownership, you might be infringing on their IP (licensed to you and others).
    - jacooper 3y ago
gramakri2 3y ago
We still use andris9's mailtrain even though the project has long died. Thanks andris9 for so many of email related node.js projects! Invaluable.
auggierose 3y ago
I like it, but I wonder: In a case like this, what is the point of offering a source-available license on GitHub at all?
- rglynn 3y ago
  Documentation is far from perfect for anything remotely sophisticated. One often runs into issues with a third-party library that comes down to not understanding what's going on under the hood. In cases like this, it's really helpful to be able to look at the source and see what the issue is, you can also (in some cases) track PRs that address issues you are encountering. I've found this numerous times with paid third party deps.
- notpushkin 3y ago
  Transparency and maybe an occasional PR from your users.
  - auggierose 3y ago
    But if they have the source code, they could just switch off the license key check, right? It seems to me he could just keep the license GPL then, wouldn't change a thing. The (small) businesses don't care about the license, but walk the path of least resistance.
    - andris9 3y ago
      This was my initial business model and it did not really work. As soon as there was the license key requirement, previously free users opted to the paid subscription to get the license key and get the upgrades. In fact all the old and free releases are still available under AGPL license from Github.
      - bachmeier 3y ago
        I suspect the reason this model works is because it's easy to say "We need X to do our work. It costs Y euros." and the company pays for it without thinking. It's probably a much tougher sell to say "We need to pay for this even though we can get it for free." Even harder is "We use this product so we should make a donation." It was never a matter of them wanting to avoid paying. I see this all the time in universities. Underfunded open source projects won't get a $100 donation from a university using thousands of copies, but a company like Matlab can get massive payments just because that's the only way to get it. You have to figure out how to make it easy to justify paying for your software.
htsh 3y ago
As a longtime user of nodemailer, thank you. I am gonna check out emailengine for future work.
rossy 3y ago
> In any case, it changed years later when a startup using Nodemailer was acquired for half a billion dollars. I was financially not in a good place back then, and when I saw the news, I started to wonder – what did I get out of this? This is really what you should expect when you work to improve the commons in the same world where there are entities that are hyper-optimized to make the most short-term profit out of anything they can exploit. Of course they're not going to give anything back. It could happen to any FOSS dev. It sucks, and it's definitely human to look at all the money they're making and feel like you deserve some of it. You do deserve it! Everyone deserves to make a living. But the world is still a better place with FOSS in it. It's a shame for this to happen to someone and for them to decide that improving the commons was a mistake and instead they should have been making projects that FOSS orgs can't use and individuals and small orgs are priced out of (but is still "peanuts" for big businesses.) If you make best-in-class software that's FOSS, everyone benefits, and you can feel proud that individuals have access to the same resources as big corps because of what you've done. I'm also tentatively in favour of the idea of scaring away big corps with GPLv3 or AGPL licensed software.
- ZaoLahma 3y ago
  This is just the thing - there needs to be a very clear reason for you to partake in FOSS, something that you want to gain from it that has a bigger value to you than the cost of allowing your time and effort to be used by others for free, and money can not be it.
  - mnau 3y ago
    Exactly, before you go to open source, take a hard look at * why I am doing that * plethora of burned-out maintainers and their posts * how I am going to deal with the issues/PRs, toxic entitlement * what's my exit strategy The first thing before you go into open source (provided it's actually used open source) is to answer these questions honestly for yourself. Because it's massive time sink with no money and *there will never be money* (unless you go open core or your employer pays you, in that case that's just a job just like any other).
xrd 3y ago
I was curious about the automated CLA process. It is interesting to me to read the answer about not supporting GitLab: https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant/issues/534 https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant/issues/534 Very terse answer that says: As you noticed, this would mean a completely different line of code I believe the author is not a native speaker, and means to say that this would require different code for each platform. Sure, that must be true, but the GitLab and GitHub APIs are not that dissimilar. I felt like this was a very strange response to a legitimate question and it makes me feel like there must be something more there.
- fastasucan 3y ago
  Sure, that must be true, but the GitLab and GitHub APIs are not that dissimilar. Which they address in the later part of their answer which you leave out: Surely most parts of the project could be reused, but this development would still mean a huge investment, which we can't afford. Nevertheless all kinds of contribution are still welcome and we would try to provide our support as good as we can.
  - xrd 3y ago
    As you point out, I am assuming malicious intent and you have every right to assume the same of me! I should have put that other part in. It just didn't jibe with me and still feels like it is an easy and obvious upgrade. But, you are right, they did justify it, it seems like an overstatement to say it would be a huge investment. I should review the code myself to verify, but a statement like that the lazy programmer in me shy away from even doing that.
    - hmillison 3y ago
      I'd guess "huge investment" in this case is relative. The maintainer is not spending a ton of time building features for the CLA tool since it's mostly "done" and so investing more time to build support for Gitlab would require many more hours of development than they're probably dedicating right now. And i can imagine that maybe they didn't abstract communication with Github enough and would need to refactor the system to handle that as well. Generally, i think it's not totally reasonable to expect them to do more free work to support use cases that the maintainer does not need. Since it's open source, we're all welcome to contribute back.
aglione 3y ago
Hey, I follow your project since I think 12 - 13 years and it has always inspired me to build something on it. At the end I didn't, but I'm really happy you found a way to live with it. Congratz!
- andris9 3y ago
  Thanks!
sgu999 3y ago
> I even went so far that when a founder of a major transactional email service sent me an email regarding Nodemailer and offered to make a donation to promote my efforts, I rejected it. To all of you around here who do FOSS, please reconsider this kind of attitude. The ones offering can be employees, and they had to argue your case. Just a couple weeks ago I asked a maintainer of one our Rust dependencies to give us a quote for fixing an issue. I had beforehand negotiated the deal with the CTO, it could have been anywhere up to $5k for roughly one day of work. No license involved, just money against some of their time to improve their open source code. To my dismay, they refused and did it "for free" while giving us a link for a donation. Guess what? The donation never came. It doesn't make sense for the ones who think in ROI, even less for the CFO behind them. Now I'm too ashamed to even show up on the issue board so we're all at a loss.
- pm215 3y ago
  One problem from the open source project side of things is that unless the project happens to be one where at least one regular contributor is a consultant who is already set up to do work-for-hire like that, it can be way too much hassle to deal with a single one-off $5K, let alone smaller amounts. There's a big chasm of "this isn't worth it administratively" before you get to "there is enough money coming in from this kind of thing that somebody could make it their job" (for instance for a developer who already has a full time job, doing work for money probably requires them to go through a lot of hassle clearing it with their employer). Some projects don't even have a setup where they could do anything useful with a donation.
  - giovannibonetti 3y ago
    For those of us that are used to working as contractors that isn't an issue, as we already have accountants and are used to making invoices every month. But I understand it can be daunting if you don't have all of that in place, yet.
    - MrDarcy 3y ago
      An accountant isn’t necessary for something like this, plans like Zoho books free or harvest take care of the same things an accountant would take care of.
komali2 3y ago
I've always felt like FOSS as a philosophy has been tangled up in trying to participate effectively in capitalism, when that was never really the point, nor really very possible unless you're lucky, nor really worth it. The origin of FOSS as I understand it from reading books like "Hackers" is from people that were mad that access was being restricted to systems and code from people that really wanted to use these systems and code, and hack them, and learn from them. I recall that one of the things Stallman likes to brag about from that time is not related to FOSS at all, but instead successfully decrypting a bunch of passwords, emailing the decrypted passwords to people, and recommending they instead set the password to an empty string instead. It was about keeping access to the system Free as in Beer. I suppose some have argued that FOSS represents a Public Commons in the way that fields and wells and physical marketplaces used to, but none of those things survived capitalism, so I don't see why a technological commons should be expected to either. For me I've been thinking lately that perhaps those interested in FOSS should instead consider how we can use FOSS to detach ourselves from needing to participate in global capitalism at all. Is there FOSS technology we can use to liberate people from things they need to spend money on right now? An example could be the Global Village Construction Set: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ a set of open source designs for things like hydraulic motors or microcombines or steam engines that you can build on your own, usually not for cheap, but for far, far cheaper than you could buy from John Deere. Here's another cool project, some guy has just been building things like solar panels and basic circuit boards on his property from very base components for years: https://simplifier.neocities.org/ https://simplifier.neocities.org/ Some other FOSS liberation examples: Combining a tool like Jellyfin with Sonarr, Radarr, and etc, can liberate people from their 5 different media subscriptions. Or at least they can still buy DVDs and put them on Jellyfin to have the convenience of streaming with the media library of their own choosing. Deploying Matrix or another FOSS communication tool can let organizations have enterprise-level communication software without paying HUGE seat-based license fees to corporations like Slack. In fact there's many ways to liberate yourself from paid SaaS in this list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted at my co-op we self-host and deploy all our services for this reason, it saves us a TON of money. I don't have many other examples to mind because this is something I'm actively still researching. Friends in Venezuela though especially tell me how FOSS technology can liberate in ways I wouldn't expect here with my 64gb RAM machine with the latest processor, that I can easily replace components on on a whim. Such as how they can keep all their broken down machines pieced together from junkyards running pretty ok on various linux distros, and how they can sell creative work using free tools like gimp (no, really) or darktable. Like as not they'll just pirate software, though, but apparently FOSS often runs better on shitty hardware. Anyway my long term plan is to find or build more and more things that let people just not spend money on things anymore. That could be by making it easier to not have to throw things away anymore, or building tools to replace proprietary ones, or, idk, other ways I haven't thought of.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
I’m convinced that the MIT license and other public domain-like licenses are the worst licenses to actually use if you’re not a FOSS ideologue. So, most people. It works against your own interests in just a subtle enough way that also works against the interests of those who use your software. At a bare minimum, you should probably at least use the GNU General Public License version 2.
- account42 3y ago
  I generally agree, the only problem, especially for libraries, is that copyleft licenses tend to be incompatible. So e.g. you can't transfer code between GPL2-only and GPL3-only projects.
- kijin 3y ago
  Exactly. Everything I've released over the last several years is GPLv2 or higher. If you don't like that, don't worry, I won't tell you to fuck off or give you a lecture on free software. You just need to pay me. Business is business. :)
  - andrewmcwatters 3y ago
    Yeah, I stopped using the MIT license moving forward some time ago. There’s no benefit whatsoever to the author, and there are perfectly permissible licenses that one can still use without allowing others to walk all over you.
    - SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
      Well, it depends on the nature of the product. Some trivial things which has 100 LOC in it is not worth GPLing, as everyone including yourself would benefit from a BSD/public domain license.
mvkel 3y ago
I like this story. Shipping OSS is a donation of one's time, money, and expertise. Volunteering is a rewarding way to participate in a community. Usually in any community, you meet someone who opens a door to an opportunity that you never would have found otherwise.
zakariassoul 3y ago
Love the story. I am curious on how your initial customers reacted to you increasing the prices?
- andris9 3y ago
  I locked prices for existing customers. So someone who signed up 2 years ago is still paying 250€ per year, while customers signing up today will pay 895€ per year.
zoogeny 3y ago
I think a key takeaway from this story is that the author started getting subscriptions once he caused the software to stop working without a license. > If you did not provide a valid license key 15 minutes after the application started, the app just stopped working. IMO, all of the shenanigans with license changes (MIT/LGPL/etc) are nothing to most users. On HN we are sensitive to these nuances . But in the "real world" of corporate worker bees just trying to get stuff done I doubt it even registers. More likely what happens is someone searches for a solution to a problem, installs it and sees if it works and then moves on with their day. Except they can't move on if the software stops working after 15 minutes. Clearly it is doing what they need, so now they need to unblock themselves. We might assume they'll read the code, find the license check and remove it. And I bet some percentage do exactly that. But some percentage of users would rather swipe a credit card for $X instead.
- j45 3y ago
  There are a lot of users who will quietly derive value from open source because they see that's how it's offered. By placing things like sustainability at the core of such projects, if the users still value it, there is a potential path ahead.
- logtempo 3y ago
  would've been fun to see if putting the 15min restriction with a hidden option in the code or similar to remove it would've lead to the same result. I'm sure many people would've paid because the free version was not advertised.
  - theturtletalks 3y ago
    Isn't this what WinRAR did back in the days? It would be a 7 day trial and then asked you to pay, but the trial never expired.
    - accrual 3y ago
      I switched to 7-Zip and never looked back, but some cool kids did buy a WinRAR license (e.g. LGR on YouTube).
GMoromisato 3y ago
The following is controversial and ill-thought-out, so feel free to flame (I gotta learn somehow!) Nobody does things for free. We do things because we gain either money or status or pleasure. If you want someone to work for you, and you don't want to pay them money, you have to give them either status or pleasure. One example of getting people to do things for pleasure is ad-supported social media sites. They are giving people pleasure (modulo engagement psychology) and getting their attention on ads for free. But let's focus on getting people to do things for status. PhDs are a classic example: if you get a PhD and stay in Academia, your salary is tiny relative to industry. But there is a promise of status ("you're on the frontier of knowledge!"; "people call you 'doctor'!"). The few principal investigators that get the giant grants are successful only because they rely on an army of underpaid experts. Which means there is an incentive--even if unconscious--to convince people that status is worth the lower salaries. The fights for being first-author, or publishing in a top-tier journal, or even insisting on being called "Doctor" are all competitions for status, because that's what you're getting paid instead of money. Open Source is the same way. Arguments about purity ("is that really an OSS license") and self-sacrifice ("I won't accept money from corporations") are all evidence that people are earning status instead of money. By itself, this is not a bad thing (in either OSS or Academia). People should be free to choose how to sell their time. The problem is that those who benefit from the work-for-status arrangement (large corporations, large universities, and their leaders) are incented to use dark patterns to preserve that arrangement. We're sensitive to social media sites using dark patterns to manipulate people into trading work (or money) for pleasure. We should be equally sensitive to how open-source culture can (even unintentionally) drive people to be underpaid.
- Beldin 3y ago
  > PhDs are a classic example: if you get a PhD and stay in Academia, your salary is tiny relative to industry. But there is a promise of status ... Which means there is an incentive ... to convince people that status is worth the lower salaries. This is likely a country-dependent thing... I'm in academia and I have never encountered anyone who was clearly doing it for status. Worse: there is a strong concept of egalitarianism in my experience. So not only do I not know of folks who "do" academia for the status, but you don't really have that much compared to others anyway. Again: this is likely country-dependent (as well as field-dependent and, perhaps, institute-dependent). And I'm likely at least a bit blind to some of what's happening since I personally don't attach much value to academic status. So your mileage may vary.
mundanevoice 3y ago
Life is too short to give stuff away for free. Monetize wherever possible. Almost everyone who gives away useful software for free burns out and stops doing it.
amoh14 3y ago
Wondering if the author ever contacted Nodemailer for sponsorship?
- nulld3v 3y ago
  Not sure how that would work considering they wrote Nodemailer.
- andris9 3y ago
  The entire Nodemailer team is just 1 person, that’s me, so there is no one else for me to contact to.
aatd86 3y ago
To be fair, as an adult, if I like something or need it, I don't mind paying at all. It is as a kid that I was a bit more... parcimonious? I think people need to be ok with being compensated. That's more cultural perhaps.
nusl 3y ago
What stood out to me was this line for the company (based on the author’s tool?) that sold for ~500M USD. “I searched my mailbox for emails related to that company and found a single complaint about a feature. No pull requests, no donations, no nothing.” I find it quite pathetic that a company whose entire life depended on the work of the author but the only thing they ever contributed was a complaint. Surely something that meant this much to them was worth either compensation or contribution of more productive kinds.

663 points by andris9 3y ago

sh79 3y ago

The title is misleading. The author changed their open source project into a commercial product with source available. It's not a business built around an open source project as the title implies, it's a license switch.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> I re-designed the UI of the app to look more professional and implemented a license key system. From that moment if you wanted to use EmailEngine (the new name for IMAP API), you needed a license key that was only available for paying subscribers. I also changed the license from LGPL to a commercial license. The source code is still published publicly on GitHub. It is no longer open-source by definition but source-available. This change of license was only possible due to requiring outside committers to sign a CLA from the start. This is the key portion. The open source project was turned into a commercial source available library with a license key. I am glad this has worked well for the developer who now has a decent income for all the hard work put into this library.

quaintdev 3y ago
So what prevents someone from bypassing the license check and run the version of application locally?
- m12k 3y ago
  Probably fear that this is the kind of red flag that would show up in due diligence, and that having piracy as part of the foundation of the tech stack that you build your business on is not a worthwhile risk to take.
- evgpbfhnr 3y ago
  Honesty? (haha) More seriously: - you get support by paying, this is important for many businesses - $1k/year is cheap - risk of getting sued if the word gets out you're using something against its license (and for network-facing code, I'd suspect it's easy enough to miss something) For me the advantage of source-available is you can always shortcut the support if there's a business critical problem and you can't wait for the author to wake up, so I think it's a great model.
  - simmons 3y ago
    I'm curious how much time a solo dev spends on support for a project like this. I can imagine some companies asking for a tremendous amount of support, or even trying to somehow get free consultation on adjacent concerns that aren't totally related to the product. Maybe it's just a matter of setting clear boundaries and limiting time?
    - andris9 3y ago
      I do support once a day for about an hour. I do monitor notifications for support emails during the day to react faster for urgent issues but there rarely is anything urgent. I guess the self-hosting side keeps support demand lower - if you are already capable of installing and running that software you can probably figure most of your issues out yourself.
- andris9 3y ago
  Most EmailEngine's customers are small-ish SaaS providers (different kinds of niche CRMs, etc), and in their position, it is not really an option to spend time / risk breaking copyright protections. Instead, they pay the subscription fee and get into building email integration features for their service. TBH, I wouldn't dare to use such a model in the B2C market, though. Everyone would pirate it.
  - RyanHamilton 3y ago
    For niche applications, it's not that terrible. I've produced an SQL IDE for years with a license key that sold <=100 individual purchases per year. I've only spoken to one person I believed pirated it. I've now went the opposite direction and made it free.
    - MattJ100 3y ago
      What led you to making it free?
    - password4321 3y ago
      Nice! https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/ https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/
- meigwilym 3y ago
  Updates, support and no losing developer time to updates and support. Sub $1k is a bargain for something so integral.
graemep 3y ago
> I am glad this has worked well for the developer who now has a decent income for all the hard work put into this library. it is also why people are reluctant to sign CLAs.
- KingMob 3y ago
  It's a sad irony that CLAs essentially put the project owner in the exact same position as the unicorn that screwed them over, by screwing over those downstream who make contributions, if/when they monetize the project. I came across some Scheme/Racket/? library recently that attempts to quantify contribution levels and distribute any received funds fairly based on that. Unfortunately, I can't find it at the moment, but it was a cool idea.
  - soegaard 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xnppM6GG9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xnppM6GG9Q
    - KingMob 3y ago
      YES! That's what I was looking for! Thank you!
  - KingMob 3y ago
    Someone shared what I was looking for! It's called Attribution-Based Economics, it pays out to all contributors based on some measure of relative contribution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xnppM6GG9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xnppM6GG9Q https://drym.org/attribution-based-economics-for-open-source/ https://drym.org/attribution-based-economics-for-open-source...
  - andris9 3y ago
    You mean I screwed over those 0.1% of commits in EmailEngine (because the other 0.1% is from the Github Actions bot writing the changelog)? Everything else is my own code. For over 14 years, I've been actively developing Nodemailer, a hugely popular project. There has been no CLA in place, and the main outside commits I get are typo fixes during Hacktoberfest. This is why I'm still the owner of 98% of the committed code in Nodemailer. Usually, if I do not fix or build something, no one else will either.
sam_goody 3y ago
> I am glad this has worked well for the developer who now has a decent income for all the hard work put into this library. Isn't this a rug-pull? Open source project which others havecontributed to, and whose reputation was earned by nature of being open source. Than, after you have users, switch to proprietary. Sounds bad to me, but maybe I didn't fully understand? BTW, Apple used to have a thing with Darwin server where you could disable the license check legally, but only a hacker would do that. Companies still paid for the software. That sounds like a better solution, IMO - at least for those that are two small to pay but growing by the seat of their pants can still use and promote the software.
- MattJ100 3y ago
  The main reason CLAs exist is to facilitate this kind of "rug pull", so I think the lesson is to either accept that it will happen or never sign a CLA.

727564797069706 3y ago

This is great stuff, thank you for sharing and congratulations! Looking to do something similar in terms of offering better, paid alternatives to the existing solutions out there in a source-available fashion. Anyone here experiencing trouble with tools you'd terribly want someone to improve?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ponector 3y ago
We are struggling with TestRail. Barely usable expensive crap. Enterprise business love such things.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

evgpbfhnr 3y ago

For anyone else wondering about the license, it's standard signing with an ec (sect239k1) key https://github.com/postalsys/emailengine/blob/master/lib/tools.js#L605 https://github.com/postalsys/emailengine/blob/master/lib/too... So the author can just write whatever validity date/license details (apparently hostname etc), sign it and give that to their customers.

daemin 3y ago
Could you elaborate on this, not necessarily the code itself, but about signing and "an ec". I'm new to this and will be wanting to provide licences for software in the future.
- scosman 3y ago
  Ecliptic curve signing. You can produce a message body like “valid_until=2025-02-25” then sign it and distribute it as an api key that’s body+sig. Client can verify signature using public key without a server call (sig validation). EC beats other signatures because signature is muuuuuch shorter, so it can still look like an API key.
- evgpbfhnr 3y ago
  "an ec key" (elliptic curve) is just a detail, this can be done with any crypto library or utility - for example directly with the openssl command: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15686821/generate-ec-keypair-from-openssl-command-line/51179147#51179147 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15686821/generate-ec-key... embed the public part in your application and you can verify that something signed with the 'dgst' command and the private key really has been signed with the private key (which you obviously shouldn't publish) (Note if using plain commands there is more friendly than openssl, minify/signify are much harder to get wrong, but I'm not sure they're as easy to use programmatically in as many languages there are for libcrypto/sodium/etc; this is really just an example)
- semireg 3y ago
  I use jwt for my app’s licensing. It works great.

carlossouza 3y ago

> The only regret I have is that I did not start selling my software earlier and only published free, open-source software. Well… better late than never. Congrats!

ThePhysicist 3y ago

Good for him! That's my experience with open-source software as well, if something is free, companies will almost never pay for it even if they get a ton of value out of it. On the other hand, if it's only a small amount e.g. 1,000 USD per year most companies let developers purchase that without much paperwork, so for these kind of tools such pricing is a sweetspot. If you go into enterprise sales territory things become way more complex and your sales cycles longer. For a solo founder that doesn't need to hyperscale this pricing scheme seems perfect.

alex_suzuki 3y ago
Agree. Developers seriously underestimate the amount of paperwork and organizational gymnastics larger companies require to buy literally anything. They won't be not buying your product because it's too expensive, but because it's just too much of a hassle. At that point, price is less of a factor than some people think.
- haolez 3y ago
  Does marketplaces like the one at AWS help with that? I can pay with my AWS billing account. Sounds like another type of sweet spot.
  - playingalong 3y ago
    In principle that should work great. In practice I don't think it's working. Not sure why.
  - playingalong 3y ago
    In principle that should work great. In practice I don't think it's working. Not sure why.
  - Valien 3y ago
    It can help for sure. Especially if a company has an EDP or PPA with Amazon. The process to become an ISV on AWS takes a bit of work though.

hyperthesis 3y ago

Next, I started to increase the pricing; 250€ became 495€, then 695€ and 795€, and finally 895€. To my surprise, it did not mean getting fewer customers. I guess any sub-$1k amount for businesses is peanuts, so the only thing these price increases changed was improving the revenue. Open sourcers identify with users, but businesses getting a ROI are unlike consumers.

ergonaught 3y ago

> In any case, it changed years later when a startup using Nodemailer was acquired for half a billion dollars. I was financially not in a good place back then, and when I saw the news, I started to wonder – what did I get out of this? This is the root of most things like the BSL. You create an open source project or product, and companies with billions in quarterly revenue build the core of their business on your software, and meanwhile won't contribute to your ongoing viability (nevermind actual success) even in amounts that are entirely trivial for them. Toss the cloud providers into it now and it's even uglier.

graemep 3y ago
I get that, but the author did not try something like the BSL, just went to a fairly typical proprietary license. Even the right open source license, such as the AGPL, would probably have worked well, with the proprietary license as an option (in the same way he tried LGPL + MIT).
- kijin 3y ago
  Well, one of OP's initial mistakes was that he thought LGPL was anywhere near "copyleft." It isn't. For SaaS companies who just want to use the software on their backend and are not interested in redistributing it in any way, there's no realistic difference between LGPL and more permissive licenses like MIT and BSD.
  - graemep 3y ago
    It looks like I was wrong. From the code he did use the AGPL. I am confused as to why the article says LGPL. Typo? Tried both?
    - andris9 3y ago
      It was a typo/mixup. Correct is AGPL, not LGPL as in the article.
le-mark 3y ago

satvikpendem 3y ago

Interesting, I actually was making a competitor to Email Engine but also open source, similar to Nylas, because I didn't like the latter's opaque pricing and I didn't like the former's self-hosting, I wanted it to be in the cloud. I even got a YC interview based on this idea for last summer's batch (rejected primarily for being a solo founder, they seem to like solo founders only if they had a previous exit), but ultimately I gave up on the project because I realized I didn't actually like the problem space, it seemed too boring for me after a while and I wanted to concentrate on building things I thought were interesting.

j1elo 3y ago

Well, Open source is NOT a business model (and your business will fail if you think that it is) https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2018/08/24/open-source-is-not-a-business-model-and-your-business-will-fail-if-you-think-that-it-is/ https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2018/08/24/open-source-... Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26602316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26602316

jraph 3y ago
What should we take away from your comment? Sure, open source is not a business model, it defines a set of software programs that respect some rules: the OSD [1]. But you can certainly have a business model around open source software. [1] https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
- Veuxdo 3y ago
  Consider the OP's headline. They didn't even describe what their project was. All they said, all they think they needed to say, was that it is Open Source. And on HN, it's actually true. Open Source projects get lots of kudos here. The problem is, others may see what is essentially a marketing strategy aimed at a niche audience and conclude that Open Source is an essential, in fact they most essential, part of the business. Hence the need to remind people that Open Source is not a business model.
  - jraph 3y ago
    I consider at some point running my own open source business. It must be around an idea that will speak to me at the time if it ever happens, but the open source part is important to me for ethical reasons. I'm not interested in running a software business if it's not open source. And so I'm interested in reading others about their business experiences around open source. What is their actual project is important since it has consequences on how the business will be run, but the exact project won't matter too much to me as a reader and it does not really matter to me if it doesn't appear in the title, I will click. Now the headline is a bit disappointing since the article is really "How I didn't keep doing open source when I turned my project into a business".

Havoc 3y ago

What sort of billing platform do people use for this sort of stuff?

andris9 3y ago
I use a self-built web page (a simple Express.js app), that uses Stripe and Stripe’s customer portal for the subscription management.
alex_suzuki 3y ago
Paddle, Lemon Squeezy and Fastspring are popular choices for Merchants of Record. These are basically distributors that sell your software in their name and take on the liability of filing taxes correctly. Stripe for people who don't care about taxes or are large enough to have an accountant do it for them.
- Havoc 3y ago
  Thanks for the detailed response. Didn’t know the merchant of record thing exists. That’s neat
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  Accountants can charge a fair bit to handle N transactions so it may be cheaper to pay a MoR 5% instead of 3% for Stripe and pay your accountant extra. All the EU makers I know are using some sort of MoR. Stripe is still very popular in USA for makers who sell to USA, as sales taxes have tresholds; unless you sell a lot from an individual state, you don't have to worry about it. VATMOSS in Europe (the regulation which drove all the small sellers I know to drop their ecommerce websites and move to Amazon - talk about regulation to protect the people and damage Big Business!) doesn't have tresholds and you need a massive up to date VAT list + storing proof of user residing somewhere.

mogoh 3y ago

> How I turned my open-source project into a business > I also changed the license from LGPL to a commercial license. OK ...

StevenXC 3y ago
They didn't make a business using an open source project; they turned their open source project into a monetized non open source project.
- zepolen 3y ago
  That's not how that works: > Derivatives works (including modifications or anything statically linked to the library) can only be redistributed under LGPL
  - jowea 3y ago
    LGPL does not bind the author(s) of the software in this way. And since there was a CLA the other authors authorized the main dev to change the license.
    - josebama 3y ago
      Thank you! This is the piece of information I was missing. I kept wondering as I read the article whether that was a LGPL license breach. Thanks for clarifying
      - throwaway11460 3y ago
        As the owner of the intellectual property you're the one licensing to others. License is a kind of contract. You're not under any license yourself, it's yours. If you accepted PRs without a contributor agreement transferring the ownership, you might be infringing on their IP (licensed to you and others).
  - jacooper 3y ago

gramakri2 3y ago

We still use andris9's mailtrain even though the project has long died. Thanks andris9 for so many of email related node.js projects! Invaluable.

auggierose 3y ago

I like it, but I wonder: In a case like this, what is the point of offering a source-available license on GitHub at all?

rglynn 3y ago
Documentation is far from perfect for anything remotely sophisticated. One often runs into issues with a third-party library that comes down to not understanding what's going on under the hood. In cases like this, it's really helpful to be able to look at the source and see what the issue is, you can also (in some cases) track PRs that address issues you are encountering. I've found this numerous times with paid third party deps.
notpushkin 3y ago
Transparency and maybe an occasional PR from your users.
- auggierose 3y ago
  But if they have the source code, they could just switch off the license key check, right? It seems to me he could just keep the license GPL then, wouldn't change a thing. The (small) businesses don't care about the license, but walk the path of least resistance.
  - andris9 3y ago
    This was my initial business model and it did not really work. As soon as there was the license key requirement, previously free users opted to the paid subscription to get the license key and get the upgrades. In fact all the old and free releases are still available under AGPL license from Github.
    - bachmeier 3y ago
      I suspect the reason this model works is because it's easy to say "We need X to do our work. It costs Y euros." and the company pays for it without thinking. It's probably a much tougher sell to say "We need to pay for this even though we can get it for free." Even harder is "We use this product so we should make a donation." It was never a matter of them wanting to avoid paying. I see this all the time in universities. Underfunded open source projects won't get a $100 donation from a university using thousands of copies, but a company like Matlab can get massive payments just because that's the only way to get it. You have to figure out how to make it easy to justify paying for your software.

htsh 3y ago

As a longtime user of nodemailer, thank you. I am gonna check out emailengine for future work.

rossy 3y ago

> In any case, it changed years later when a startup using Nodemailer was acquired for half a billion dollars. I was financially not in a good place back then, and when I saw the news, I started to wonder – what did I get out of this? This is really what you should expect when you work to improve the commons in the same world where there are entities that are hyper-optimized to make the most short-term profit out of anything they can exploit. Of course they're not going to give anything back. It could happen to any FOSS dev. It sucks, and it's definitely human to look at all the money they're making and feel like you deserve some of it. You do deserve it! Everyone deserves to make a living. But the world is still a better place with FOSS in it. It's a shame for this to happen to someone and for them to decide that improving the commons was a mistake and instead they should have been making projects that FOSS orgs can't use and individuals and small orgs are priced out of (but is still "peanuts" for big businesses.) If you make best-in-class software that's FOSS, everyone benefits, and you can feel proud that individuals have access to the same resources as big corps because of what you've done. I'm also tentatively in favour of the idea of scaring away big corps with GPLv3 or AGPL licensed software.

ZaoLahma 3y ago
This is just the thing - there needs to be a very clear reason for you to partake in FOSS, something that you want to gain from it that has a bigger value to you than the cost of allowing your time and effort to be used by others for free, and money can not be it.
- mnau 3y ago
  Exactly, before you go to open source, take a hard look at * why I am doing that * plethora of burned-out maintainers and their posts * how I am going to deal with the issues/PRs, toxic entitlement * what's my exit strategy The first thing before you go into open source (provided it's actually used open source) is to answer these questions honestly for yourself. Because it's massive time sink with no money and *there will never be money* (unless you go open core or your employer pays you, in that case that's just a job just like any other).

xrd 3y ago

I was curious about the automated CLA process. It is interesting to me to read the answer about not supporting GitLab: https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant/issues/534 https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant/issues/534 Very terse answer that says: As you noticed, this would mean a completely different line of code I believe the author is not a native speaker, and means to say that this would require different code for each platform. Sure, that must be true, but the GitLab and GitHub APIs are not that dissimilar. I felt like this was a very strange response to a legitimate question and it makes me feel like there must be something more there.

fastasucan 3y ago
Sure, that must be true, but the GitLab and GitHub APIs are not that dissimilar. Which they address in the later part of their answer which you leave out: Surely most parts of the project could be reused, but this development would still mean a huge investment, which we can't afford. Nevertheless all kinds of contribution are still welcome and we would try to provide our support as good as we can.
- xrd 3y ago
  As you point out, I am assuming malicious intent and you have every right to assume the same of me! I should have put that other part in. It just didn't jibe with me and still feels like it is an easy and obvious upgrade. But, you are right, they did justify it, it seems like an overstatement to say it would be a huge investment. I should review the code myself to verify, but a statement like that the lazy programmer in me shy away from even doing that.
  - hmillison 3y ago
    I'd guess "huge investment" in this case is relative. The maintainer is not spending a ton of time building features for the CLA tool since it's mostly "done" and so investing more time to build support for Gitlab would require many more hours of development than they're probably dedicating right now. And i can imagine that maybe they didn't abstract communication with Github enough and would need to refactor the system to handle that as well. Generally, i think it's not totally reasonable to expect them to do more free work to support use cases that the maintainer does not need. Since it's open source, we're all welcome to contribute back.

aglione 3y ago

Hey, I follow your project since I think 12 - 13 years and it has always inspired me to build something on it. At the end I didn't, but I'm really happy you found a way to live with it. Congratz!

andris9 3y ago
Thanks!

sgu999 3y ago

> I even went so far that when a founder of a major transactional email service sent me an email regarding Nodemailer and offered to make a donation to promote my efforts, I rejected it. To all of you around here who do FOSS, please reconsider this kind of attitude. The ones offering can be employees, and they had to argue your case. Just a couple weeks ago I asked a maintainer of one our Rust dependencies to give us a quote for fixing an issue. I had beforehand negotiated the deal with the CTO, it could have been anywhere up to $5k for roughly one day of work. No license involved, just money against some of their time to improve their open source code. To my dismay, they refused and did it "for free" while giving us a link for a donation. Guess what? The donation never came. It doesn't make sense for the ones who think in ROI, even less for the CFO behind them. Now I'm too ashamed to even show up on the issue board so we're all at a loss.

pm215 3y ago
One problem from the open source project side of things is that unless the project happens to be one where at least one regular contributor is a consultant who is already set up to do work-for-hire like that, it can be way too much hassle to deal with a single one-off $5K, let alone smaller amounts. There's a big chasm of "this isn't worth it administratively" before you get to "there is enough money coming in from this kind of thing that somebody could make it their job" (for instance for a developer who already has a full time job, doing work for money probably requires them to go through a lot of hassle clearing it with their employer). Some projects don't even have a setup where they could do anything useful with a donation.
- giovannibonetti 3y ago
  For those of us that are used to working as contractors that isn't an issue, as we already have accountants and are used to making invoices every month. But I understand it can be daunting if you don't have all of that in place, yet.
  - MrDarcy 3y ago
    An accountant isn’t necessary for something like this, plans like Zoho books free or harvest take care of the same things an accountant would take care of.

komali2 3y ago

I've always felt like FOSS as a philosophy has been tangled up in trying to participate effectively in capitalism, when that was never really the point, nor really very possible unless you're lucky, nor really worth it. The origin of FOSS as I understand it from reading books like "Hackers" is from people that were mad that access was being restricted to systems and code from people that really wanted to use these systems and code, and hack them, and learn from them. I recall that one of the things Stallman likes to brag about from that time is not related to FOSS at all, but instead successfully decrypting a bunch of passwords, emailing the decrypted passwords to people, and recommending they instead set the password to an empty string instead. It was about keeping access to the system Free as in Beer. I suppose some have argued that FOSS represents a Public Commons in the way that fields and wells and physical marketplaces used to, but none of those things survived capitalism, so I don't see why a technological commons should be expected to either. For me I've been thinking lately that perhaps those interested in FOSS should instead consider how we can use FOSS to detach ourselves from needing to participate in global capitalism at all. Is there FOSS technology we can use to liberate people from things they need to spend money on right now? An example could be the Global Village Construction Set: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ a set of open source designs for things like hydraulic motors or microcombines or steam engines that you can build on your own, usually not for cheap, but for far, far cheaper than you could buy from John Deere. Here's another cool project, some guy has just been building things like solar panels and basic circuit boards on his property from very base components for years: https://simplifier.neocities.org/ https://simplifier.neocities.org/ Some other FOSS liberation examples: Combining a tool like Jellyfin with Sonarr, Radarr, and etc, can liberate people from their 5 different media subscriptions. Or at least they can still buy DVDs and put them on Jellyfin to have the convenience of streaming with the media library of their own choosing. Deploying Matrix or another FOSS communication tool can let organizations have enterprise-level communication software without paying HUGE seat-based license fees to corporations like Slack. In fact there's many ways to liberate yourself from paid SaaS in this list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted at my co-op we self-host and deploy all our services for this reason, it saves us a TON of money. I don't have many other examples to mind because this is something I'm actively still researching. Friends in Venezuela though especially tell me how FOSS technology can liberate in ways I wouldn't expect here with my 64gb RAM machine with the latest processor, that I can easily replace components on on a whim. Such as how they can keep all their broken down machines pieced together from junkyards running pretty ok on various linux distros, and how they can sell creative work using free tools like gimp (no, really) or darktable. Like as not they'll just pirate software, though, but apparently FOSS often runs better on shitty hardware. Anyway my long term plan is to find or build more and more things that let people just not spend money on things anymore. That could be by making it easier to not have to throw things away anymore, or building tools to replace proprietary ones, or, idk, other ways I haven't thought of.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

I’m convinced that the MIT license and other public domain-like licenses are the worst licenses to actually use if you’re not a FOSS ideologue. So, most people. It works against your own interests in just a subtle enough way that also works against the interests of those who use your software. At a bare minimum, you should probably at least use the GNU General Public License version 2.

account42 3y ago
I generally agree, the only problem, especially for libraries, is that copyleft licenses tend to be incompatible. So e.g. you can't transfer code between GPL2-only and GPL3-only projects.
kijin 3y ago
Exactly. Everything I've released over the last several years is GPLv2 or higher. If you don't like that, don't worry, I won't tell you to fuck off or give you a lecture on free software. You just need to pay me. Business is business. :)
- andrewmcwatters 3y ago
  Yeah, I stopped using the MIT license moving forward some time ago. There’s no benefit whatsoever to the author, and there are perfectly permissible licenses that one can still use without allowing others to walk all over you.
  - SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
    Well, it depends on the nature of the product. Some trivial things which has 100 LOC in it is not worth GPLing, as everyone including yourself would benefit from a BSD/public domain license.

mvkel 3y ago

I like this story. Shipping OSS is a donation of one's time, money, and expertise. Volunteering is a rewarding way to participate in a community. Usually in any community, you meet someone who opens a door to an opportunity that you never would have found otherwise.

zakariassoul 3y ago

Love the story. I am curious on how your initial customers reacted to you increasing the prices?

andris9 3y ago
I locked prices for existing customers. So someone who signed up 2 years ago is still paying 250€ per year, while customers signing up today will pay 895€ per year.

zoogeny 3y ago

I think a key takeaway from this story is that the author started getting subscriptions once he caused the software to stop working without a license. > If you did not provide a valid license key 15 minutes after the application started, the app just stopped working. IMO, all of the shenanigans with license changes (MIT/LGPL/etc) are nothing to most users. On HN we are sensitive to these nuances . But in the "real world" of corporate worker bees just trying to get stuff done I doubt it even registers. More likely what happens is someone searches for a solution to a problem, installs it and sees if it works and then moves on with their day. Except they can't move on if the software stops working after 15 minutes. Clearly it is doing what they need, so now they need to unblock themselves. We might assume they'll read the code, find the license check and remove it. And I bet some percentage do exactly that. But some percentage of users would rather swipe a credit card for $X instead.

j45 3y ago
There are a lot of users who will quietly derive value from open source because they see that's how it's offered. By placing things like sustainability at the core of such projects, if the users still value it, there is a potential path ahead.
logtempo 3y ago
would've been fun to see if putting the 15min restriction with a hidden option in the code or similar to remove it would've lead to the same result. I'm sure many people would've paid because the free version was not advertised.
- theturtletalks 3y ago
  Isn't this what WinRAR did back in the days? It would be a 7 day trial and then asked you to pay, but the trial never expired.
  - accrual 3y ago
    I switched to 7-Zip and never looked back, but some cool kids did buy a WinRAR license (e.g. LGR on YouTube).

GMoromisato 3y ago

The following is controversial and ill-thought-out, so feel free to flame (I gotta learn somehow!) Nobody does things for free. We do things because we gain either money or status or pleasure. If you want someone to work for you, and you don't want to pay them money, you have to give them either status or pleasure. One example of getting people to do things for pleasure is ad-supported social media sites. They are giving people pleasure (modulo engagement psychology) and getting their attention on ads for free. But let's focus on getting people to do things for status. PhDs are a classic example: if you get a PhD and stay in Academia, your salary is tiny relative to industry. But there is a promise of status ("you're on the frontier of knowledge!"; "people call you 'doctor'!"). The few principal investigators that get the giant grants are successful only because they rely on an army of underpaid experts. Which means there is an incentive--even if unconscious--to convince people that status is worth the lower salaries. The fights for being first-author, or publishing in a top-tier journal, or even insisting on being called "Doctor" are all competitions for status, because that's what you're getting paid instead of money. Open Source is the same way. Arguments about purity ("is that really an OSS license") and self-sacrifice ("I won't accept money from corporations") are all evidence that people are earning status instead of money. By itself, this is not a bad thing (in either OSS or Academia). People should be free to choose how to sell their time. The problem is that those who benefit from the work-for-status arrangement (large corporations, large universities, and their leaders) are incented to use dark patterns to preserve that arrangement. We're sensitive to social media sites using dark patterns to manipulate people into trading work (or money) for pleasure. We should be equally sensitive to how open-source culture can (even unintentionally) drive people to be underpaid.

Beldin 3y ago
> PhDs are a classic example: if you get a PhD and stay in Academia, your salary is tiny relative to industry. But there is a promise of status ... Which means there is an incentive ... to convince people that status is worth the lower salaries. This is likely a country-dependent thing... I'm in academia and I have never encountered anyone who was clearly doing it for status. Worse: there is a strong concept of egalitarianism in my experience. So not only do I not know of folks who "do" academia for the status, but you don't really have that much compared to others anyway. Again: this is likely country-dependent (as well as field-dependent and, perhaps, institute-dependent). And I'm likely at least a bit blind to some of what's happening since I personally don't attach much value to academic status. So your mileage may vary.

mundanevoice 3y ago

Life is too short to give stuff away for free. Monetize wherever possible. Almost everyone who gives away useful software for free burns out and stops doing it.

amoh14 3y ago

Wondering if the author ever contacted Nodemailer for sponsorship?

nulld3v 3y ago
Not sure how that would work considering they wrote Nodemailer.
andris9 3y ago
The entire Nodemailer team is just 1 person, that’s me, so there is no one else for me to contact to.

aatd86 3y ago

To be fair, as an adult, if I like something or need it, I don't mind paying at all. It is as a kid that I was a bit more... parcimonious? I think people need to be ok with being compensated. That's more cultural perhaps.

nusl 3y ago

What stood out to me was this line for the company (based on the author’s tool?) that sold for ~500M USD. “I searched my mailbox for emails related to that company and found a single complaint about a feature. No pull requests, no donations, no nothing.” I find it quite pathetic that a company whose entire life depended on the work of the author but the only thing they ever contributed was a complaint. Surely something that meant this much to them was worth either compensation or contribution of more productive kinds.