I will now charge my clients a fee to support open source projects
dev.to
dev.to
The solution? Offer your code under an open source license, but also have a purchase option to buy a commercial license. In many cases, the commercial version is a compiled and validated official executable, available with a support contract. But there is no reason that the came code can't be made available under both licenses, or that the commercial license can't actually be the same GPL (or whatever) license the open source one is offered under.
This way, the technical team that chooses the software has an invoice that they can send to purchasing, to get corporate support dollars to the open source project.
"what do you mean it's like donating to a charity? we already have a corporate social responsibility budget, and it's spent on XYZ. We don't need to donate anymore".
I seek contributions back, while not leaving a gaping hole for SaaS vendors to extend & close my codebase.
Because it's the "officially supported" version and companies don't like running software that isn't eligible for official support.
The open source project could do the same thing -- free for personal use (including code!) and $X for corporate use (including code!).
Open Source means just that: that the source is open and available. You are thinking about "free software"
> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
What you're describing is sometimes referred to as a "source available" license, which is a much lower standard.
There is one problem though, when you put a commercial license to your software, it effectively make you a software seller and thus maybe facing associated legal issues and responsibilities (provide user support, pay tax for example).
And sometime, those responsibilities can be a huge trouble.
OSS does not have the legal contracted support that commercial software does.
The upside of selling license is that some of that money can be used to buy insurance and taxes and whatnot.
I don’t think there’s a way to get paid for OSS work directly without these responsibilities. Even if there’s a tip jar, there is an expectation of support and some warranty.
And there is paid membership in business associations. That is closer to the purchasing department than to the donation department.
It really is a no-brainer: If there is an organization/foundation which supports the project, the enterprise could just join that, and may in turn even receive voting rights on the future direction of the project.
No need to make complex schemes to work around being unable to donate, or try to sell open source code.
Corporate policies are often so rigid, and it's so easy to set up a PayPal button and a "members mailing list", that you might as well.
Ticketmaster is the perfect example of this. You buy a concert ticket for $35, but after all of their exorbitant bullshit fees, it's more like $50-55. But if they just told you "$50 is what you pay" then you'd probably not care at all.
So go ahead and charge whatever you want for a fee. Just don't penalize your customers for the things you want to personally support.
If you just raised your price by X%, you are now more expensive relative to your competitor's (and they don't donate, so thus out-competing you).
Pay for Enterprise support for that open source product? Way too expensive, no way.
Pay for 5 engineers in completely separate teams to badly implement, partially support, and later replace part of the Enterprise features as proprietary extensions over 2-3 years, while company's actual product languishes without the functionality it could have used? Take my money.
Meanwhile, keep paying for SaaS and proprietary software, because there's no alternative, supposedly.
I don't mind, I'm learning something new. I suppose that in itself adds value to the company.
It would if the information got imbued back into the rest of the company, but it most often manifests as domain experts, who when they go away, someone else has to learn the thing all over again.
They tend to have a service provider handle the processing for them. Most decent sized churches will have their own mobile apps too.
https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-donating-to-musl-libc-proje...
If you think your software is valuable enough to cost money (instead of offering it for free) then do so.
There are so many corrupt non-profits to which one can make tax deductible donations. Would it be possible to reform/tweak/hack the [existing] donations to help their bottom line?
I bet someone out there is already doing this.
I'm sure it's not the right way to make OSS sustainable.
The only way (which i believe) to make OSS sustainable, is that, you open source the core or toolings, let others fork it, and you make contract to support enterprise clients, to support the open core.
i feel like most smaller maintainers do it for fun/cool factor and if they get something from it then its a bonus.
i guess we could look at youTube as a model there, i think most creators start out doing something they love and only turn into a business when they see it can be sustainable, they have no shortage of creators