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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Godot engine has this model. They are getting donations from patreon [1], enough to pay 2 people full time at the center of the project. Wikipedia is another project which is doing this very successfully.

But in general, those methods bring you much less money than if you were proprietary, because as you rightfully point out, most people are "freeloaders".

[1]: https://www.patreon.com/godotengine

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to nitpick, but to me the term 'freeloaders' has a negative connotation and I don't think it should in the case of FOSS. Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS.

Apart from that, you make good points :)

You have a point. I've added " around it.

Do you mean free as in beer, or free as in speech here? I'm still honing my understanding of FOSS, and I'm not 100% sure that FOSS means free as in beer.

> I'm not 100% sure that FOSS means free as in beer.

It doesn't. The only requirements for licenses like GPL, etc. is that anyone who you distribute a binary to can ask you for the source code, and you must provide it for a reasonable fee (for GPL it's "for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source", and you must provide the source on request for as long as you offer support for the binary blob, with a minimum of three years).

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Can't find it now, but I recall finding a link here (by the developer(s) of curl iirc) about how his BMW had a screen with the free software credits and BMW sent him a CD with the source when he requested it.

Edit: couldn't find that BMW article, but here are a few interesting links related to that:

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/08/12/a-hundred-million-car...

(multiple BMW screenshots in this page) https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/10/03/screenshotted-curl-cr...

The ability to somehow acquire the source is one of the requirements, but from the making money PoV it is not that significant.

What is significant for this discussion is that another GPL requirement is that whoever you distribute software to is permitted to redistribute however they see fit.

Free software is about freedoms, but also tends to be available for free. Consider this: if I sold a piece of free software for $1000 and the buyer was free to share its source code, wouldn't they? Even if no actual user shared the code, a trader could buy the software and sell it onward for $500 to as many people as possible. The next trader would buy for $500 and sell copies for $100, etc.

Now, the software might be difficult to build or run or use, and the vendor might be actually selling binaries, or the software as a service, or documentation, or consultation, etc. Those can be valid business models even if the source code is freely available.

So theoretically, yes, free software could cost money. But its source code tends to be free as in beer, too. Freedom is much more valuable than the saved money, and that's why free beer gets scoffed at.

Openloaders? ;)

> Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS.

Are you aware of the F in FOSS being free as in libre/free speech?

>Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS

The original point is to be able to debug, audit and modify the software you are running. And as far as I can tell that's still the core principle (note for example how there's no FOSS licence that prohibits sale of the software, and there is in fact niche FOSS software you have to buy to obtain).

> enough to pay 2 people full time at the center of the project

Being able to only pay two people full time for a massive effort such as a full featured 3D game development system is a blatant commercial failure.

Chinese livestreaming industry is based on donations, so-called 'virtual gifts', and top streamers can make $100,000 a month or more.

That's more of an entertainment business, basically based on watching. Streamers are nothing else than sports arenas imho. or musicians.

It's not so easy to get 10k people watch you code. I'd like to see it though.

It doesn't have to be restricted to livecoding. What about authors of the software you use answer to your questions? Well, to be creative, how much would you pay to watch Stallman dance for you?

He dances for free:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t96m2ynKw0

I'd pay to watch him not sing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw

In my book the main part of the 'virtual gifts' experience is in 'for you'.

i wouldn't want people to have to become entertainers online to get money in order to afford to write their OSS project!

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