Excerpts from Richard Stallman's talk in Mandya, India

I'm unaware of any economic model that allows a product or service to cost 0 but simultaneously net the producer > 0.

There are plenty of business models out there that maintainers can make money with, in a capitalistic society, this usually involves creating your own business or working for company that uses the software.

If no one is paying for your open source project, is it because you don't know how to build an actual product on top of it or is the market maybe telling you something?

You can't usually sell FOSS because any of your downstream customers can undercut you. Since they may be doing less development than you (to the point of doing nothing), any business model around FOSS that relies on directly selling your software is risky. I suppose it can work, but it requires all of your downstream customers to be working in concert with you, which is very unlikely long term (and especially unlikely if you start making a lot of money).

You can try to offer SaaS services on top of your FOSS software, but that will also be undercut if you are reasonably successful.

This gives you a couple of options. First, you can try to eke a living out of selling software/SaaS but making little enough money that you don't attract attention from competition. This is not necessarily unreasonable if you are trying to make a living wage. People are unlikely to compete with you if the pool is only $100K a year.

But in reality, the only actual scarcity that you have to offer is your time. Very rarely do you see someone fork a project, do a huge amount of development work and offer up the result. People/organisations trying to cash in on your work will be trying to avoid doing development. Otherwise they will almost certainly prefer to look at your effort and rewrite it from scratch.

This means you have to charge for development work. There are only really 2 ways of doing this: find contract work for your project (up to and including sponsoring development entirely), or asking for willing support of development (aka "donations").

I think it's incorrect that donations aren't enough. It's fair enough to say that they generally haven't been enough, but I think part of the problem is the idea that a "donation" is optional. Especially for business software/services, one thing I've heard over and over again is: "We would pay for this, but there is no way to get an invoice". IMHO, this is actually the problem. It's not that there is a shortage of people willing to pay, it's more that there is a difficulty making the payment happen. Even non-corporate end users are willing to pay for software and support development (what percentage of people would hold up their hand and say they wouldn't pay for the tools they use every day). It's more that they don't pay (strangely, quite a few free software game developers have discovered that putting their game on Steam results in money appearing, simply because it is a convenient method for people to pay).

I think part of the problem with current FOSS business models is that they are predicated on the idea that people won't pay unless forced to rather than the idea that people will pay, but don't because there is too much friction in the payment area (psychological as well as actual).

Fix the payment issue and I think you will find that you have a viable business model which is robust because anyone wanting to challenge you has to produce better than you, rather than just ride your coat tails.

One small thing I would also advise: don't overlook trademarks! There is a very good reason why the GPL does not include a trademark license. Do not hand out your trademark to your downstream customers and allow them to piggyback on your success. Force them to build their own brand if they want to market software/services using your code.

Plenty of companies create, use and release open source software using permissive open source licenses.

When the licence itself and the mantra that goes with it are both hostile to business use, it’s no surprise business doesn’t get involved.

There are 3 different aspects here: 1. you're selling support 2. the customer is using the support 3. it's open source, so anybody can sell support

So in order to be profitable, you want to maximize your income (1.) and minimize your expenses (2.), that is, sell lots of support for software whose quality is good enough that the customers rarely have to actually call the support hotline.

But if the customer does call the support hotline you have to ensure that the support they get is top quality, otherwise they'll take advantage of 3. and leave for your competitor (note, "we'll support ourselves in-house based on the upstream release" is effectively another competitor here).

Another point: there are multiple levels of support, and different organizations can cooperate to provide the full package; at the lowest level you tell the end user to check if the computer is powered on; at the higher levels you root-cause and fix bugs and implement new features, which is where you can really market expertise with specific projects.

Of course you're right to point out that you're limited to enterprise clients; I haven't heard of any success with selling support to consumers.

In a way that's what xaaS offers.

However devising a way to let the customer keep his data on-premises may be a major factor, as some (many?) consider their data confidential and therefore prefer store it on their own controlled environments.

As any serving software needs an adequate underlying machine and OS, the service company needs subcontracting partners and/or ways to certify.

It seems to me that Red Hat (along with SUSE, and many other similar companies) may one day adopt this approach.

Personally I don't think economic systems are necessarily better for the creation of rich people. I know it's a minority opinion, but I feel like it leads to lottery type winner-take-all situations where a few popular creators have absurd amounts of money, and the long tail don't have enough to get by. If you had commie programmers all paid a similar fair wage from the government you could generate plenty of good free software and reward effort rather than some mix of luck and skill.

[0]: http://faif.us/

EDIT: additional clarification

It's not necessarily an issue of morals. Take cellular tracking [1], for example: avoiding carrying a phone around with you 24/7 is the only real way to address things like carriers from selling your realtime location data. Then, simply borrowing someone else's to make a convenient call doesn't open you up to anything. And then morals do come into it because you can say "well, at least I'm trying".

And convenience and other values such technology offers is non-arguable, it's just unfortunate it's so anti- freedom and privacy. In that regard you can't blame Stallman for participating when society as a whole is pushing such complete and utter reliance on mobile devices. That's like calling someone who advocates for privacy disingenuous for using a CC over cash 100% of the time; you can't even book most hotels without a CC, (and ID, and other identifiable information tying you to that exact location at that exact date). So what choice does even the privacy-advocate have, besides camping out on the road in a tent and boycotting anti-cash establishments? I've read of some Scandinavian countries already phasing out cash, which is once again a reliance society fosters. If Stallman walks into a store and asks someone to pay for his purchase with their CC because the store doesn't take cash, are you too going to make some contrived anti-vaccination comparison?

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/01/10/phone-c...

It’s only been the last ten years or so where pay phones have disappeared from public spaces. And with the increased proliferation of WiFi, making a VoIP call from a laptop or whatever will likely become more and more practical in the future.

GPS is a passive antenna / receiver. You don't emit anything with GPS, you just passively pick up signals from GNSS satellites. You could "turn it off" by unpowering the GPS receiver, but there's little benefit there, and that may not be possible because most of these are soldered directly to the mainboard for power efficiency reasons. These embedded receivers barely use any power whatsoever, and if your cellular / WiFi is already off, it's certainly not transmitting it in real time. If you want to stop location logging you would need to opt out of location logging. I don't know if that's possible with Apple Watch products, but turning GPS "off" doesn't tend to make a lot of sense in many contexts.