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Open source projects using a donation model tend to do roughly as well as games using a donation model. And both tend to do roughly as well as the guy standing

Open source projects using a donation model tend to do roughly as well as games using a donation model. And both tend to do roughly as well as the guy standing next to the offramp using a donation model. Open source projects using a model where people pay for the software tend to do nicely, however. The distinction in what you pay for can be as simple as "you're now officially allowed to use this in a commercial product" or "in addition to the paid version, we also offer a completely free* version" (where "free" is defined by some insane guy and his cult from the 70s to mean something completely orthagonal to "free", in a completely non-standard way seemingly designed to raise red flags with your company's legal department)

patio11 12y ago
Yep. One very prominent example, which drives most of the sales at Binpress (the company I invested in, which I mention only to identify them rather than for promotion): if you GPL a library, that makes the entire app that includes that library not saleable on the App Store. This doesn't make the library useless, because you can still use it in internal applications or pre-release versions of your app, but "We need to ship to the App Store" is a fairly big bullet point for a lot of potential customers of e.g. a SDK which lets you edit PDF files on an iDevice in an arbitrary application. That particular feature occurs in a lot of enterprise apps, because the enterprise runs on PDFs. So if you say "Totally free for your geeks to use internally, and btw, $2500 if they want to put it on the App Store", you'll collect more in a single license sale than 99.99% of donationware apps make in a month. This is called the dual licensing model. Mechanically, you control the copyright to the code, release it under GPL, and -- in parallel -- release it under a commercial license which restricts what people can do with it but which is "non-viral."
- pa7 12y ago
  What would you suggest if your OS project was bound to MIT and there's no way of introducing a commercial license? heatmap.js (my pet project) unfortunately has those constraints and I'm currently trying a mixed model of high priced premium support and donations. Donations got me almost nothing, high priced premium support got me a few hundred dollars within a few weeks after I introduced it- more than I made the last 4 years with donations. I'm also trying binpress as a secondary channel to sell support. will see how it performs over time, but binpress looks promising so far
  - patio11 12y ago
    Take two of your most commonly requested features which are only useful for enterprise users, add them to Heatmap.js Commercial, charge $500 a year for it, and promote Heatmap.js Commercial along with heatmap.js. I don't know what those features would be for heatmaps, but I strongly suspect it will sound like "integrates with ... out of the box." Basically, wholesale clone sidekiq's model. They're also on MIT, and he does pretty well for himself.
  - rmc 12y ago
    You can still sell a MIT licenced version. It's just that, unlike the GPL, it's possible for someone to use it on (say) App Store without having to pay.
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  I'm in two minds about binpress. I think the direct sales model seems more consumer / SME orientated whereas I feel all the money in dual licensing lies in large companies wanting to cover themselves for licensing audits. So there are (IIRC) a few companies offering approved reviewed versions of OSS code (ie Firefox built by them and they checked it is properly signed source code etc). But I don't know of anyone doing this approach It should be interesting - but their python offering - oh dear. Really oh dear. If that's indicative then I would suggest they start to niche down for a while. Focus on medical OSS or Govt OSS instead of everyone and everything. Attract specifics I wish them well, I just am worried.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Love the off ramp metaphor :-) thank you

patio11 12y ago

Yep. One very prominent example, which drives most of the sales at Binpress (the company I invested in, which I mention only to identify them rather than for promotion): if you GPL a library, that makes the entire app that includes that library not saleable on the App Store. This doesn't make the library useless, because you can still use it in internal applications or pre-release versions of your app, but "We need to ship to the App Store" is a fairly big bullet point for a lot of potential customers of e.g. a SDK which lets you edit PDF files on an iDevice in an arbitrary application. That particular feature occurs in a lot of enterprise apps, because the enterprise runs on PDFs. So if you say "Totally free for your geeks to use internally, and btw, $2500 if they want to put it on the App Store", you'll collect more in a single license sale than 99.99% of donationware apps make in a month. This is called the dual licensing model. Mechanically, you control the copyright to the code, release it under GPL, and -- in parallel -- release it under a commercial license which restricts what people can do with it but which is "non-viral."

pa7 12y ago
What would you suggest if your OS project was bound to MIT and there's no way of introducing a commercial license? heatmap.js (my pet project) unfortunately has those constraints and I'm currently trying a mixed model of high priced premium support and donations. Donations got me almost nothing, high priced premium support got me a few hundred dollars within a few weeks after I introduced it- more than I made the last 4 years with donations. I'm also trying binpress as a secondary channel to sell support. will see how it performs over time, but binpress looks promising so far
- patio11 12y ago
  Take two of your most commonly requested features which are only useful for enterprise users, add them to Heatmap.js Commercial, charge $500 a year for it, and promote Heatmap.js Commercial along with heatmap.js. I don't know what those features would be for heatmaps, but I strongly suspect it will sound like "integrates with ... out of the box." Basically, wholesale clone sidekiq's model. They're also on MIT, and he does pretty well for himself.
- rmc 12y ago
  You can still sell a MIT licenced version. It's just that, unlike the GPL, it's possible for someone to use it on (say) App Store without having to pay.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
I'm in two minds about binpress. I think the direct sales model seems more consumer / SME orientated whereas I feel all the money in dual licensing lies in large companies wanting to cover themselves for licensing audits. So there are (IIRC) a few companies offering approved reviewed versions of OSS code (ie Firefox built by them and they checked it is properly signed source code etc). But I don't know of anyone doing this approach It should be interesting - but their python offering - oh dear. Really oh dear. If that's indicative then I would suggest they start to niche down for a while. Focus on medical OSS or Govt OSS instead of everyone and everything. Attract specifics I wish them well, I just am worried.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

Love the off ramp metaphor :-) thank you