Hacker News Reader

As someone that was part of an effort to do this in the early .com days, it is a lost hope trying to sell open source software to consumers.

While selling to enterprise can be made via consulting and training, most consumers just want a one time shot paying for their software.

Well, if you do that with commercial software, usually the only way to avoid paying is piracy.

In open source world, they can just go to another guy that is re-packaging your work and making it available for free, thus killing your source of income.

Which is the major reason most desktop software shops are going the store model, hoping that higher control will prevent that kind of workaround (which doesn't work with rooted devices anyway), or forcing consumers to migrate to a SaaS like in the good old timesharing days.

I might add that FOSS developers are the first to blame, as contrary to most professions, many go to great lenghts to avoid paying anything, while feeling entitled their costumers pay them.

I am overgeneralizing here, but you see it every time someone comes up with licensing changes as means to be able to keep working on the product that they love, right away the forum gets flooded with free beer alternatives and vocal complaints how everyone is going to migrate to something else.

Yes, I agree with what you say.

I actually think the dual-licencing model seems the most realistic for many developers who are selling to a business. Ironically, it's because a strong copyleft licence like the GPL is unattractive to many businesses that they naturally turn to the commercial licence which allows them to make changes they don't need to release publicly.

I'm sympathetic to what Fair Source is trying to do, but even that garnered a lot of negative reaction among developers (at least if you read the discussion on Hacker News).

I don't think the primary problem is cost, but that when you build your product tightly coupled with a propretary product that is hard to migrate off of then the vendor of that product can shake you down, or they can go bankrupt or what have you. It makes your business vulnerable, and no one wants that.

Also your production environment crashing because a license expired. Fun times.

You really aren't replying to the person who actually tried to make money in open source and related some actual experience of why it didn't work.

Businesses actually don't give two sh*ts about being "tightly coupled" with a proprietary product. That's a sysadmin thing. It makes sense to the "us" of the world, but businesses don't care.

Look at any area or field where billions or trillions of dollars worth of transactions still go through systems running on IBM iSeries, or mainframes. It's just the cost of doing business.

I agree with this. That's why I avoid most web and SAAS platforms for things nowadays. I make an exception for things where I can get my data off their platform in a format I want pretty easily (i.e. I will use Google Docs because I can easily download the files as DOCX or PDF files) or the data I'm storing with them is mainly settings or preferences (I.e. Youtube knowing I'm subscribed to X publishers).

I've been burned a few times and lost data just because a company goes out of business, or I decided I wanted to use a different platform and all my data from before was locked in to this other proprietary system.

So yeah, if you're coming up with this hot new productivity/task software and I can't either download the data in an open format or at least use the software on the desktop, 100% offline? No thanks.

And in general I hate subscriptions unless I'm getting access to libraries of content, i.e. Spotify, Netflix, or it's just for updates. By that I mean I get the software and a year's worth of updates when I paid for the license, and it's mine, you can't take access away from me, I have it for as long as I want, and I only pay again when I decide I use the software enough and the updates are compelling enough that I really want to update.

Which is another reason why SAAS and Web apps don't really work for me, because they almost invariably charge a monthly fee and there's nothing to download so I just lose access the moment I stop paying. There are exceptions, but those are rare (mainly web hosting and cloud storage).

It's for this reason why I refuse to pay for Adobe Suite, because you only have access for as long as you pay the monthly subscription. Screw that, my copy of Adobe Illustrator pre-subscription still gets the job done fine thanks. I might have upgraded by now if they hadn't switched to a subscription model, but now I'm going to keep using that as long as humanly possible, then search for an alternative.

In all fairness, the software that you buy today is almost certainly going to stop working at some point in the future as you upgrade your OS etc. So, unless you can download data into some reasonably open format, you will eventually lose access anyway.

That said, I don't disagree with your basic point. In the case of Adobe, I use one of their programs fairly heavily. But most everything else is once in a blue moon. As a result, their Suite subscription doesn't work for me as I'm perfectly happy running something from a few versions back. Subscriptions only make sense for things you use pretty regularly.

Yes, but this is a symptom, not a cause, of a non-competitive market. You get stuck with only one option in markets where most of the other players have left the market because they can't figure out a way to make money in that market anymore. With competitive markets, switching costs are typically optimized away by the players that are interested in poaching one another's customers.

Yeah, there's a contingent that won't ever be happy with a commercial arrangement.

Just thinking about the way that version control was done for Linux before Git. The author of the system was happy to have people using it as long as no one reverse engineered the product that he was actively selling to customers. The reaction from the community was, "thanks for contributing your hard work...now I'm going to make a clone."

There's a sense of entitlement that really turned me off of open source *nix for a long time. That's just me though. I'm over it, it won...OSS won...free beats everything in the end.

What do you think of the viability of providing source code with the software that you sell? It would be open source in the sense that you could alter the software and contribute patches, but you had to pay for the software first.

It would have to eliminate forking by necessity. I don't see that as being a downside, though. I think the open source community commonly forks code to save time when the correct technical decision should really be doing ground-up rewrites.

I think the primary issue would be giving away the 'secret sauce' so to speak. But a motivated competitor could still decompile and reverse engineer an application. Would giving away the source code make it easy enough to do that it makes a big impact? like how Android apps are so trivially easy to clone that Chinese competitors can clone an app in seconds.

This is how the Delphi and Turbo Pascal 3rd party markets have worked for a long time: you pay for 3rd party components/libraries, but they almost all come with source code or an option to purchase the source code for an additional charge. It works really, really well, especially for larger organizations that buy from smaller organizations that want to ensure the continued availability of the software and/or audit it for security purposes.

Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software?

Do you really expect people to pay for something when they can get it for free?

Making software open source means you are either selling something complementary (hardware, other software, services) or else begging for crumbs.

I don't know much about these things and I'm making this up as we go but I wonder if we can use AGPL or a stronger version of AGPL. Basically, you pay for a subscription or everything on your servers that touches this software must be free and open source. Should work for researchers and students and there is a continued revenue stream. For example, require any software that talks to a rest API also be foss. With more people paying, the subscription can slowly become cheaper and more accessible. Thoughts?

Many companies already do this. See Mobicents, which we use at my current job.

Thoughts?

It depends. In my own business I decided open source 'customers' are more trouble than they are worth so I do very little.

Just the fact that people are willing to pay for my software is a strong validation that I'm doing something useful and on the right course.

Let's look at your examples about Red Hat and GitLab. Managers pay for service contracts from those companies so they have a "throat to choke" if things go sideways so it's not simply their neck on the line. From a CIO's point of view, a service contract is an insurance policy against standing before the CEO or board and saying "I have nobody but myself to blame, I have nobody but my team to fix the issue -- and they don't know how." Typically it's a start-up or a company where the CEO/founders are driving the technical decisions where you find IT using CentOS, PostgreSQL, etc without a support contract... and when there's enough revenue or investors buying that "throat to choke" is part of due diligence in a growing business.

>- There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. (Naturally doesn't work with permissive licences. Requires a strong copyleft licence like the GPL).

Red Hat doesn't dual-license and sells subscriptions (support, updates, backports, KnowledgeBase, etc.) for open source offerings that use a variety of different licenses including permissive ones (e.g. OpenStack).

With regards to WordPress, it’s the lack of policing on the OSS-ness of a plug-in — as you mention — helps create a viable market, but many of the most successful plugin devs sell a premium version tied to a service in some way. Whether the service is necessary is often beside the point, the SaaS aspect can be used as a shield to obfuscate the open source code.

I also think with WordPress in particular, the target customer doesn’t know how to compile the plugin source if they find it. It’s easier to pay than to figure out how to get it for free. Now, whole rings of people sharing premium themes and plugins exist, but the malware often added to those items can turn people off of that method. It’s easier to just buy it.

Honestly, support seems to be the most long lasting option — see RHEL and Canonical and Oracle with their Linux distros. You can use centos instead of RHEL (and could before red hat took it over, for that matter), but you’d need to deal with the the problems yourself or have a person on staff to deal with them. Especially as stuff is more cloud-based,it’s easier to just have a support contract.

The problem with this model for the indie developer, of course, is that the act of offering support has a cost too. Time, extra staff, logistics — and that can be harder to do than the closed-source perpetual license model, where you offer support but it’s understood the transaction is primarily for the software. And just speaking for myself, if I buy a piece of software, I’m not necessarily going to bug the dev every time something breaks b/c I was really buying the ability that use the software that would otherwise not be available to me. But if I am explicitly paying for support, I’m going to be more entitled, even if it’s for an OSS product. Because if I don’t get support and it’s OSS, why didn’t I just compile it myself and save money?

Interesting, that Fair Source License seems like the perfect example of how your software can simultaneously be open source software but not free software. It doesn't matter if it's open source if I can't modify it and deploy it to however many computers I want to.

This is kind of timely, as setting up a Patreon account is something we (DB Browser for SQLite / sqlitebrowser.org) did a few days ago:

https://www.patreon.com/db4s

For us it's an initial experiment, as we had no idea at all if anyone would decide to become a Patron.

However, it's um... 3 or 4 days since the account creation and already some people have become Patrons. Kind of nifty. :)

Other people have been at it longer, and are definitely having a measure of success with it. For example, seeing Gina Häußge being able to work full time on OctoPrint gives us hope for the future. :)

https://www.patreon.com/foosel

> There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat.

This bit is confusing to me. AFAIK Red Hat doesn't use a dual-licensing approach.

Is it something they've recently introduced?

Redhat owns Centos if I recall correctly. Prior to that centos was just a rebuild of all the open source parts of redhats software.

Yep, Red Hat (note - not "RedHat") does employ several of the core CentOS team these day, although it started out externally.

> ... just a rebuild of all the open source parts of redhats software.

That seems like super weird description of things. :)

All of the Red Hat OS software is Open Source. The only significant pieces CentOS don't include are the Red Hat branding and artwork:

https://www.centos.org/about/

As far a dual licensing goes... that doesn't seem related to this? :)