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Comment by unity1001 | Hacker News Reader

> Open source projects are under financed

Freemium format. It floats the WordPress plugin ecosystem. That ecosystem has $1 bn size. Likely larger now since that statistic was made 1-2 years ago.

You give the base software and most if it free. You provide paid addons for niche, corporate, business use cases etc. Everyone is happy - the userbase gets their software free, advanced & business users have advanced features that could not have made it into the main software in addition to having paid support. And most important for everyone - the project & its organization can sustain itself and it can keep maintaining its software.

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How do you accomplish that for a programming language? Make the language open source but sell a proprietary debugger? And how does that solve the problem corporations controlling languages, given that you would presumably have a corporation controlling at least the proprietary components?

> How do you accomplish that for a programming language?

That's a more difficult case of course. But I believe enterprise support and custom enterprise features/addons could help in the case of languages.

> corporation controlling at least the proprietary components?

WP plugins are still GPL. But the users can buy, download them from the original source, install them on their site, and update them from their site with one click. Coupled with premium support, this works well. Its a bigger risk and hassle to 'pirate' the plugins from 3rd parties rather than just getting everything directly from the source. (though such 'piracy' does have impact).

In any case, one organization controlling at least the proprietary, custom enterprise components is much better than the alternative.

Think Pycharm.

Look at Laravel. Open source framework creates saas opportunities, conference opportunities, sponsorship opportunities.

Look at tailwinds, open source lib with saas opportunities that netted the creator millions of dollars

So become a corporation?

I think whatever format that works would be ok, right? A cooperative, or a foundation with an attached company (a la WP foundation + Automattic etc), whatever that works would be ok.

I typoed corporation. My point was that you would become the very thing you were trying to avoid.

There is no problem in organization. What matters is who controls an organization and how it works. A corporation is just an organizational entity. It can be run in many ways. It does not have to be organized and run like a privately owned capitalist corporation.

The difference isn't organization, it's whether the goals of the project need to be yoked to a profit motive. If they are, invariably you're going to eventually put the cart before the horse.

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