Monetizing Developer Tools
github.com
github.com
One of the experience selling enterprise software vs selling developer is that, it is very hard to sell anything to developers. My hypothesis is that, the problem statement or product that you are selling to developers has to be either very boring for them or technically very complex that you can't do it themselves. If the product falls in that chasm, you are now not only competing with other organisations but also developers. It becomes hyper competitive and would take huge amount of effort and capital to be successful.
PS. the title is little ambigious.
Maybe this is just an in hindsight observation. Most of those millions of dollars were never spent developing FOSS projects created in free time as a labor of love. The money aspect only becomes apparent when the result can be monetized with 0 marginal cost, because copying bits has no marginal cost.
It feels unfair when you consider someone earning millions doing the bit copying, while nothing is passed down to the source of those bits, where the effort was done. But that effort can be framed as if it's "already paid for" (with love, scratching an itch, hoping to receive attention for doing the lord's work). I'm not saying the amount payed was "fair", but apparently it was "sufficient", because otherwise the project never would have gotten where it evidently is.
mold developer wrote a linker starting with something - he used OS, editor, desktop environment, a browser, and even GitHub, which are mostly free. He started with a free base. He didn't write his own compiler, a language etc. He accepted patches, ideas, and issue reports from other people. If you decide to sell something but "it does not sell", either it is a problem with your business, or you simply hire a salesperson.
> I have seen large orgs use softwares from individual developers who release software with permissive license and never contribute anything back
And yet, many companies contribute back with something that individual developers could not even think about developing due to constrained resources - compilers, virtual machines, OS drivers, etc. Many of them will donate money anonymously. Even so-much-hated AWS gives your company/brand/project something no one thinks about: wide visibility and free marketing. Let's be honest: people started to learn about ElasticSearch when AWS started to give it as an installation option for free (saying this as someone who started with ES when Kimchy pushed his early alpha version).
> It is very hard to sell anything to developers
Developers are not a good comparison because developers usually bad in sales and overall business management. How often have you heard: "Oh, you pay for FTP cloud service? I can write that in a day; let me do some pip/npm magic." Writing code is the easy part; making profitable business from that is the hard part.
> It takes an immense amount of effort to build and a simple `docker pull` to use it.
Yet that "simple docker pull" took millions of dollars (of VC money, big corps investments, and general FOSS time) and was given for free.
> Builders and creators should be paid for what they have built.
Builders and creators should be paid for what they have built, but after they stamp the price on their work from the beginning. Let the market decide if that price is worth it. If they see their project took off and they can earn some bucks by milking users later, that is cheating.
No, it isn't.
Open source developers are not under an obligation to continue providing their time for free. If they choose to pivot the project to some form of monetization, that's their right.
Previous versions remain available under previous licenses - that gift to the world remains, and stays available for communities to fork from, should they choose to.
If a project gains sufficient traction and delivers sufficient value that people depend on it, it's in everyone's best interest that the developer finds a way to monetize, so they're motivated to continue working on the project.
As you say, then the market will decide if it's a price worth paying, if they can live without the service, or if they'd rather take on the build burden themselves via a fork.
But Free Today does not entitle you to Free Forever.
It is easier said that done. If there an opensource project and another company that is VC backed that used the project and built out a solution. The opensource developer they pivot to monetization and compete, they are more likely to lose as they don't have clear GTM, marketing and strategy. When you start building something out, your GTM has to be very clearly chalked out.
Fyi... the author wrote a more expansive blog post about selling open-source dev tools a few months later (2023-06-06) and there was a related HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36225016