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Comment by starbugs | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

"And if you think you ‘suffer from piracy’ or find it hard to do business with Free Software? Just distinguish yourselves with the proven successful free/open source business model: provide docs, training, content, frequent updates and support. Your customers will love you!"

Well, then why does Blender need a development fund? [0]

I honestly agree with most of what this article says and I admire the spirit of open source development and the GPL. Still, I don't think it's a viable business model for all of us under all circumstances. People need to be able to make money with their software or otherwise some software just won't be available. I guess that's effectively what this says for the Blender community. Nothing wrong with that at all, just not the way to go for everyone.

[0] https://fund.blender.org/

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Yeah. The idea of a world where every piece of software is free and open is a nice one, but unfortunately we live in a society where people have to be compensated for their time in order to live, and doing support won't always cut it.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not downplaying that ideal, only pointing out that at least in the United States it's pretty unrealistic. In some other western countries they don't balk at the idea of public funding for projects that benefit society, and those would be one example of taking steps towards that more idealized world.

Nobody is talking about every piece of software having to be free; if they want to make add-ons that can be sell they should have made those plugins for a software that allows such financing model such creating plugins for Autodesk Maya.

The statement in the article makes it sound as if providing documentation, support, etc. is a somewhat reliable way to get your work on Blender plugins and — implied — on other free and open-source software funded. I guess that's the reason for the impression that this somehow generalizes the statement to a broader software market.

"Your customers will love you!" even implies that this way of doing business is somehow superior to other licensing models.

I'd say: Your customers might love you, but for most projects this is likely also going to translate to "your customers won't pay you".

Why? People want to donate. Would be silly not to take their money and use it to improve the project even more. I would argue that donations is a key part of this style of FOSS business model.

The realty is that donation-based is not a sustainable business model. You basically can't always afford to eat based on it, leave alone to rent an apartment.

Ditto for the much touted GPL “service model” - charging for support and training. Realistically, this just does NOT work for anyone except for RedHat, because otherwise there would’ve been plentful examples everytime this subject surfaces and there’s always none. Also saying this as an ISV with tens of years of experience - making living off GPL-licensed software through secondary services is an absolute suicidal pipe dream. Even the double-licensed model (which is not applicable in Belnder's add-on case) is dramatically inferior to more conventional licensing models.

Then the article should maybe add this to the list of how plugin developers are supposed to fund their operations to support Blender.

> I honestly agree with most of what this article says and I admire the spirit of open source development and the GPL.

If you don't admire the spirit of free software as well / instead, then you may have missed the point of the article.

How is me allegedly not admiring something related to missing "the" point of the article?

Open source is not Free software. The blog post is about how Blender is firmly behind the GPL and free software, which is in opposition to just having available source code without assured user freedoms.

Yeah, I never said that it is :) I honestly don't get the point of your comments, but I think you may not be getting the point of mine either.

To clarify: the article contains advice about how to fund operations for plugin developers. I doubt that it is viable for all plugin developers to fund their operations off of documentation and services. I am just saying that we should be honest and express that funding the development directly will be needed and probably the only way to get it is donations. That's really all I am saying here.

I think a lot of people get confused about that. There are hundreds (probably more) of paid software that offers it's source code up. You can use it to learn from or make improvements if you want but must pay if you want to actually use it.

One example is I was recently messing around with Space Engineers code. Keen software gives opens it up but doesn't mean you can just download the code and get the game for free

That does not comply with the official (OSI) definition of open source and is a misuse of the term. It's a pity that people get away with this and cause this kind of confusion.

The actual Open Source Definition is much like the Free Software Definition, in the letter. A source-available license wouldn't be OSI-approved, so it wouldn't technically be open source.

On the legal side, free software and open source could very well be considered sinonyms (if that makes sense). The actual difference is one of attitude and end-goals.

TFA refers heavily to 'free' as in the freedoms associated with this.

You cite 'open source' as something that you admire.

It's well known that 'free software' describes an attitude that the 'open source' crowd wasn't as keen to embrace, hence the subsequent linguistic wrangling.

The article refers to a "free/open source business model". Even there the terms are used in a somewhat identical fashion.

I really don't see how this kind of linguistic wrangling helps. Instead it kind of diverts from my initial point and drives the discussion into nitpicking.

> The article refers to a "free/open source business model". Even there the terms are used in a somewhat identical fashion.

This is not true.

The word 'free' is used six times in the first paragraph to emphasise the point being made, then they really spell it out for you :

"This freedom is what makes the GNU GPL license so powerful and it is why it’s much more than 'open source'."

> Well, then why does Blender need a development fund?

Why wouldn't they have such a fund? Sponsoring is a viable FLOSS business model, and it heavily overlaps with support (which is discussed in your quote from the blogpost).

The notion that "people" aren't "able to make money" with FLOSS is just a fallacy, and Blender itself is one of the clearest examples of how wrong it is - it was failing as a commercial prospect, and then got "rescued" or "ransomed out" as FLOSS via crowdfunding - one of the earliest crowdfunding initiatives I'm aware of, for that matter; well before there was anything like Kickstarter, Indiegogo etc.

It is not a viable model.

How many people are actually paid by the Blender Foundation for their contributions to the software? How many fewer employees do they have than a company like Autodesk or Maxon?

The simple fact is that FLOSS is the outsourcing of large swathes of development cost to those stupid or interested enough to make something happen for free on their own time.

What do you do when that interest wanes?

You're fucked.

> What do you do when that interest wanes?

What do you do? You pay for support, plausibly via a crowdfunding-like mechanism - continued development and maintenance being something that's encompassed by "paid support", of course. What do you do when interest in a piece of proprietary software wanes and the original developer goes out of business altogether? Never mind, you answered that quite nicely already!

FLOSS is more viable than non-FLOSS in the long run. And we have solid empirical evidence of that, because we still have code from the 1970s and 1980s chugging along nicely as part of our modern Linux distributions. Try that with Windows 10, or even mac OS!

And yet, in the meantime...

> ... How many fewer employees do they [Blender Foundation] have than a company like Autodesk or Maxon?

...how is that supposed to be a bad thing, exactly? It's a lot like measuring the worth of a software project by the LOC of its source code, given a constant or even shrinking set of features.

How is the fact that there is old code in modern Linux distributions suddenly becoming empirical evidence on the viability of a business model? A business model does not become viable because you as the customer are somehow able to work on the project after it is no longer commercially available. By the way: there are a lot of commercial projects having escrow agreements to solve that problem without having to be open source.

I simply don't buy that we all should be living off donations to support our software development. It's utterly clear that only the biggest projects can pull that off, and even there — only to a certain degree, with some notable exceptions (RedHat, Linux).

> I simply don't buy that we all should be living off donations to support our software development.

Most "software development" is internal software that exists simply to solve some organization's bespoke issues, and is not open to the public - FLOSS vs. proprietary is a non-issue there. As far as off-the-shelf, non-internal stuff goes, software maintenance is actually a bigger issue than software development per se, and it's entirely appropriate to say "I will not be putting any effort into maintaining this unless you pay me some real $$$ for the trouble." So, I'm not even sure that we're disagreeing about anything of relevance - except inasmuch as "being able to work on the project - or to sponsor work on the project by third-parties - no matter what" is often very important!

> Most "software development" is internal software that exists simply to solve some organization's bespoke issues

Do you have a source for this?

> The notion that "people" aren't "able to make money" with FLOSS is just a fallacy

Which fallacy?

The one you quoted. Many people make money from open source software.

The comment they’re replying to said “I don't think it's a viable business model for all of us,” not that it’s not a viable model for any of us.

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