Okay? This particular project is soliciting donations:
“Support us with a monthly donation and help us continue our activities.”
I’m not really sure what your point is, because you never actually made one. You just said I was wrong.
“Support us with a monthly donation and help us continue our activities.”
I’m not really sure what your point is, because you never actually made one. You just said I was wrong.
- Stable income vs. unplannable amount of bounties
- Bounties generally don't cover general maintenance work for a project (e.g. updating dependencies)
- Bounties (as they are implemented today) generally only pay the contributor, and not the maintainers, which can also have significant cost in reviewing a feature
- Bounties traditionally have been so disproportionally small compared to the work required that they don't come close to provide a reasonable hourly rate for contributors
(I think you'll find enough articles that go into more details on the difference between the two.)
Bounty platforms have been around for ages, and I don't know a single project that is able to finance itself from that. Even for the OBS example you mentioned, it the bounty was a good way to get the ball rolling on a specific issue, but the overall maintenance is still financed by monthly sponsoships.
One-off donations might be a nice supplement, but they don't form a solid foundation.
Whereas something like dual-licensing promotes a value-based pricing model (our fortune 500 doesn't need to pay 5 engineers for a year to build and maintain this distributed system; we would happily pay equivalent of an engineer per year for that.)
Suppose a developer, let's call him Salvatore, lives in a modest apartment in, say Italy, and would live very comfortably indeed on three hundred thousand euros a year.
And let's say three cloud providers, call them, Jungle, Blue, and Lots, agree to give Salvatore a hundred thousand a year each to keep developing a, I don't know, a high-performance in-memory database. Lucky Salvatore, plenty of money for doing what he loves anyway.
Let's say that this database is quite good, and Jungle, Blue, and Lots each make a cool hundred million a year in pure profit renting out instances that run Salvatore's code.
So, whilst Salvatore has done perhaps better with the cost-plus model than he was before, he is capturing just 0.1% of the economic surplus that is being generated by his code.
And that is the problem in this scenario: if all elements of the value chain are cost-plus except one, that one element captures all of the surplus even though it may not be deserved.
If you tried to charge for Redis then "everyone else" would stop using it and pretty much all of the value disappears. It becomes a niche product that you shouldn't build on. You're vulnerable to high license fees and experienced developers become harder to find since few get experience with it.
RedisLabs does charge for redis (extensions, and support) and seems to be doing pretty damn well for the matter.
You haven't really said where I was wrong.
>RedisLabs does charge for redis (extensions, and support) and seems to be doing pretty damn well for the matter.
Charging for extras is not the same thing as charging for the product.
> The problem with this is that Redis isn't used because it is particularly good. It's used because everyone else uses it.