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I think it can work, though you have to be careful to avoid conflict with community goals. It seems to work best when the "premium services" involve technical

I think it can work, though you have to be careful to avoid conflict with community goals. It seems to work best when the "premium services" involve technical support or custom open source development, rather than closed-source code. Canonical and Red Hat are examples of for-profit businesses that primarily build and distribute free software, including employing some of the developers and managing some of the open source projects they distribute. I believe both make money primarily through "premium services" (especially "enterprise" support services). Ximian was a for-profit company started by Nat Friedman and GNOME project founder Miguel de Icaza, which developed much of the GNOME code base for a while. (It was later acquired by Novell.) Miguel went on to found the Mono project and Xamarin, the for-profit company that leads development of Mono. Qt, MySQL, InnoDB, and Berkeley DB were each developed in part by businesses using dual licensing models, where licenses for use with non-free-software were available for a fee. (The original companies have since been acquired by Nokia, Sun, Oracle, and Oracle, respectively. Sun was itself later acquired by Oracle.) The author of SQLite earns income by providing commercial support and custom development services: http://www.sqlite.org/support.html http://www.sqlite.org/support.html The developers of CyanogenMod recently founded a VC-backed company to fund its development. I'm sure there are a bunch more examples like this that I've forgotten or don't know about. I agree that a non-profit foundation has benefits for free software projects. (I've been a developer on three projects associated with non-profits: Audacity, Debian, and Mozilla.) "For profit" as I used it above may be the wrong label, though. "Taxable" might be a better word in some cases. If a company is privately held, then its owners can use it to pursue a mission other than maximizing profit. For example, I'm employed by the Mozilla Corporation, a taxable entity that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The Corporation has to pay taxes because of the nature of its income and spending, but its mission is still that of its sole shareholder, the Foundation.

mlvljr 13y ago
With Qt, Digia seems to start betting on "here's the free parts, and here's a version of them which is better (Creator)," which does induce some fear.
IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
> If a company is privately held, then its owners can use it to pursue a mission other than maximizing profit Well, that depends on your shareholders. Mozilla Corp can do this, because its only shareholder is Mozilla Foundation. However, the minute you take institutional investment, hand out shares to employees, take on debt financing, etc., you are now bound by a fiduciary duty to do right by those other parties. You still can focus on other things, but only if they don't conflict with turning a profit. In my opinion, "turning a profit" in fact serves the greater needs of the npm/node community, because servers cost money. npm isn't just a program, it's a service, and services require infrastructure. So, it's not a conflict at all. It is a very foolish business person who sees an exponential curve of user engagement, and decides that the best way to make money is to screw all those people.
- yapcguy 13y ago
  > However, the minute you take institutional investment, hand out shares to employees, take on debt financing, etc., you are now bound by a fiduciary duty to do right by those other parties. You still can focus on other things, but only if they don't conflict with turning a profit. This is not true. The shareholder value myth has been debunked by law professors. "...shareholder primacy theory was first advanced by economists, not lawyers. This may explain why the idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value is based on factually mistaken claims about the law." http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6482 http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6482 "Contrary to myth, the sale of Ben & Jerry’s to corporate giant Unilever wasn’t legally required." http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_truth_about_ben_and_jerrys http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_truth_about_ben_...
  - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
    Yeah, whatever. Academic. IANAL, but I'm guessing you aren't either, so let's leave that to the lawyers. I'm sorry I brought it up. Bottom line, I've done a lot of work on npm over the last 4 years, and I've got some ideas about how to best take care of it in the future. Those ideas require money, and it's a lot easier to get money if you have a plan to turn it into MORE money. (This IS still a site about startups, right? ;) If things keep expanding and growing like they have, then it's going to require more money. So, we've gotta earn our keep to be sustainable, and the way to do that is to provide stuff people will pay for. Also, I like to make money. It's fun, and it keeps you grounded in reality, if you run it like a responsible business. So that's another nice plus of going this route. I still have full flexibility to carve things up however I want later on, and like I said, we're keeping every option on the table.

mlvljr 13y ago

With Qt, Digia seems to start betting on "here's the free parts, and here's a version of them which is better (Creator)," which does induce some fear.

IsaacSchlueter 13y ago

> If a company is privately held, then its owners can use it to pursue a mission other than maximizing profit Well, that depends on your shareholders. Mozilla Corp can do this, because its only shareholder is Mozilla Foundation. However, the minute you take institutional investment, hand out shares to employees, take on debt financing, etc., you are now bound by a fiduciary duty to do right by those other parties. You still can focus on other things, but only if they don't conflict with turning a profit. In my opinion, "turning a profit" in fact serves the greater needs of the npm/node community, because servers cost money. npm isn't just a program, it's a service, and services require infrastructure. So, it's not a conflict at all. It is a very foolish business person who sees an exponential curve of user engagement, and decides that the best way to make money is to screw all those people.

yapcguy 13y ago
> However, the minute you take institutional investment, hand out shares to employees, take on debt financing, etc., you are now bound by a fiduciary duty to do right by those other parties. You still can focus on other things, but only if they don't conflict with turning a profit. This is not true. The shareholder value myth has been debunked by law professors. "...shareholder primacy theory was first advanced by economists, not lawyers. This may explain why the idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value is based on factually mistaken claims about the law." http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6482 http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6482 "Contrary to myth, the sale of Ben & Jerry’s to corporate giant Unilever wasn’t legally required." http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_truth_about_ben_and_jerrys http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_truth_about_ben_...
- IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
  Yeah, whatever. Academic. IANAL, but I'm guessing you aren't either, so let's leave that to the lawyers. I'm sorry I brought it up. Bottom line, I've done a lot of work on npm over the last 4 years, and I've got some ideas about how to best take care of it in the future. Those ideas require money, and it's a lot easier to get money if you have a plan to turn it into MORE money. (This IS still a site about startups, right? ;) If things keep expanding and growing like they have, then it's going to require more money. So, we've gotta earn our keep to be sustainable, and the way to do that is to provide stuff people will pay for. Also, I like to make money. It's fun, and it keeps you grounded in reality, if you run it like a responsible business. So that's another nice plus of going this route. I still have full flexibility to carve things up however I want later on, and like I said, we're keeping every option on the table.