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Commercial FOSS software is in a weird situation

The code is open, so anyone can compile it for free, and when enough people care, any of them with a bit of free time is permitted to distribute builds, like people do for Ungoogled Chromium.

Also, the teams and organizations that create Free Software are often non-profit organizations and volunteers, where customer care and market analysis is nonexistent.

The idea of selling free software is something that I see a lot in theory but almost never in practice. Sometimes I think it was just Stallman preaching what was applicable in his time bit it's not realistic in today's world.

It is more realistic in today's world.

There are a TON of open source projects I would be willing to support with corporate money if I could charge it as a "Sale" to my corp card, or invoice it as a "software sale" not a "Donation to a non-profit"

I need no approval to buy software, I need approval to donate company money.

Personally, I'd like to see more of a "support contract" business model. You pay amount X to the lead developer(s), and in exchange get assistance for issue troubleshooting, preferential treatment of feature wishlists...

The problem with this approach is that a lot of open source software is internationally developed, and it creates a two tier class of developers: those who can benefit from the customer payments and those who (have to) work on the software on their own time with no material benefits. As soon as you introduce financial benefit into any kind of organizations, power balances and group dynamics will always massively change, which often enough then leads into forks, splits or in the worst case in lawsuits (e.g. about trademarks).

It becomes particularly complex if the developers are outside of the US and EEA legal areas: dealing with non-profits or international payments/employment is pretty much a settled thing there. But for developers outside these areas, there are a host of issues, some of which delve deep into uncharted legal territory: how to employ them, do you need fixed contracts or project-based ones, which taxes and how much apply, how to pay bribes (in some lesser developed countries, that is absolutely necessary to get permit applications processed), how to get any money transferred in the first place, are sanctions at play (e.g. the US sanctions Cuba, the EU does not, or the entire clusterfuck regarding Russia)...

There is a startup called Ringer that is working on facilitating the support contract model. Also, lots of different projects have pages to connect freelancers with people needing support for the project.

https://www.ringerhq.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32764701 https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources#freelanc...

One way you can convert "donation" into "sale" is sponsoring conferences, you get "advertising" for your company and the projects get money, some of which goes to conference expenses (inc travel etc) and the rest goes to the project.

What do you need to change "donation" to "sale"? In theory they are the same for open source, the project gets money, you get the project even if you didn't spend money on the donation/sale.

There are trademarks available for this use case. See for instance redhat and centOS or firefox and iceweasel.

The main difficulties are that you have to provide some value/convenience (e.g. see krita on steam) and that if you mess up your project people might actually leave. For instance if the new MS office is dramatically worse people will drag their feet but will eventually buy it anyway, but when people did not like the direction of openoffice they did not stand for it and made libreoffice.

> it's not the same in terms of usability.

Office 365 has made it so Libre is the clear winner in UX for most of my users last 5 years, honestly.

In what way?

My gut feeling is that most people mostly like their documents just being everywhere and being accessible everywhere. Office 365 storing things in the cloud, that's pretty much the case, you don't really need to understand where a file is (it's "in Office") or how to move them. Another bonus is not having to worry about what's been deleted. It's only based on anecdotes, but I suspect this is a lot more important to people than most other aspects of the software.

Yeah... No. Not gromking filesystem location is creating an entire generation of computer users illiterate in basic computing concepts, or even being capable of mapping through technical abstractions to answer silly things like "where are the bits you desire now?"

This is not a good thing at all, as it's creating a form of indoctrination to learned helplessness that isn't easy to get past. At least nowhere near as easy as it was in the past.

You're right that it creates that, however it's the "better UX" of not having a filesystem that leads to the use of those features, which leads to users not practising the skills, which leads to that "illiteracy".

While I personally think a filesystem has great UX for my purposes, never accidentally losing a file is a much better UX for most people. As much as it causes friction to not have these basic computer skills now, I suspect it's less "illiteracy" and more _progress_. We don't criticise people for not knowing how to ride a horse today, because we have public transport and cars. We don't criticise computer users who can't use a 5.4" floppy drive because we have USB sticks and cloud storage.

> computer users illiterate in basic computing concepts

What’s a “basic computing concept” anyway? My 4 year old granddaughter doesn’t know a bit from a byte or a file from a folder, but was able to pick up an iPad and intrinsically start using it to do far more powerful things than I would have been able to do at 4 years old on a IBM Model 370 back in the 70s

People care about free software to different degrees.

For example, the Mozilla Public License used by LibreOffice is neither free in the way of the GPL, nor free in the way of BSD or MIT...MPL lives in a middle ground between as--in-beer and as-in-freedom.

Personally, convenience is one of the reasons I run LibreOffice on Windows. Sure, all things being equal, I would rather not pay for Office. And all things being equal, I would rather use non-proprietary software.

Of course all things are never equal. And one of my personal turnoffs is managing the type of subscriptions, upgrades, etc. that are inevitable with proprietary software these days...Stay-off-my-lawn [redacted].

>For example, the Mozilla Public License used by LibreOffice is neither free in the way of the GPL, nor free in the way of BSD or MIT...MPL lives in a middle ground between as--in-beer and as-in-freedom.

The MPL, GPL, and BSD licenses are all free as in freedom and generally free as in free beer, though as this article shows they don't have to be. They have different limitations, but let's not add another three more definitions to the already overworked word "free."

The GPL is copyleft, the BSD license is permissive, and the MPL is in between.

It's going to backfire because you can't compete with free. Other than the name, what benefits would Libre offer over a fork that is distributed for free?

I mean they could come with an (enterprise) cloud offering or consultancy, but it would need a lot of infrastructure and development.

I don't think that's a problem for them, they don't appear to care if people don't buy it there. The issue is not people not buying it, it's a new type of user coming in, who is a _customer_ and therefore expects things that they have not had to offer before.

Likely not going to backfire, no.

Whoever forks and distributes it for free needs to set up the infrastructure, websites, community forums etc etc. It is not cheap in both money and man-hours.

Adding to that, they need to have the persistence to continue running and maintain the fork for years to come.

If they stop providing a signed binary outside the Mac Store (IDK if they did), then this is the only safe way to get it other than a self compile. Add in auto updates and supporting the foundation and it seems reasonable.

Why would it backfire? They're not taking away the free offering, they're just putting a paid offering in the App Store for people who want to download it that way.