Open-source cannot live on donations alone | Hacker News Reader

Open-source cannot live on donations alone

binpress.com

32 pointspytrin21 comments

The title should be: "making a good living by publishing your code on Binpress.com"

Not sure if being snarky or not. If you have concrete feedback / criticism, we'd love to hear it.

Concrete feedback: once I hit the phrase "license generator" it became unclear to me whether the projects that had been commercialized by you still were actually open source.

I've had enough bad experiences with people who wanted the open source label while not being open source that I don't give the benefit of the doubt any more. And I'm not interested enough to go to your site to investigate for myself.

By open-source we are talking about the availability and sharing of code, for the benefit of everyone involved. The choice of whether to use an existing open-source license, a generated license (with the developer's choices) or a combination (i.e, what most big open-source companies do, such as MySQL, Magento, etc) - is up to the developer. We are trying to promote the sharing of code - even code that would not have been released under free open-source licenses.

So you've redefined a term that already has a well defined meaning to mean something totally different.

Just because I can look at the source of something does not mean it's open source. If it doesn't have an open source license it's just proprietary code that ships in source form.

I didn't redefine anything. You are welcome to read about [1] Commercial Open Source. You talk as though the availability of the source-code has no value.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_open-source_applicat...

The only relevant thing in that link is dual-licensed software. But looking at binpress it seems like much of the software there is only available under a proprietary license. The license generator can easily be configured to generate a proprietary license.

I didn't say that source code has no value, but providing source is not the same as an open source license, which has significantly more value.

Our "developer" license is very similar to a free open-source license in the liberties it provides, except for a non-compete clause which says you can't redistribute "as-is" (you can, however, as part of a larger / modified work). This is a big concern for a lot of people working on commercial products - if adding this clause gets them over the hump to release their code - we think there's tremendous value in that.

On the other hand, almost all of our licenses include an SLA - which no free open-source license does. In fact, one of the main reasons often cited by people releasing code with FOSS licenses is that they don't have to support it (doesn't mean they won't, they just don't have to). We think the guarantee of support is worth a lot in certain sectors (such as SMBs and enterprise).

The license generator is a fantastic resource! And so far as I can tell one can use it however they like (they need not sign up with binpress to use them). I'd much prefer to offer software under the GPL, but also offer a proprietary license for sale for those who cannot release their source code and are happy to pay for the privilege.

I don't understand what service you're offering - discovery doesn't seem to be a big add-on - if the license is open, why don't people just use the code?

Discovery, curation and support is what we offer on the front for people looking for solutions. For developers, we provide a complete platform to turn their open-source project into a business, something that is usually only accessible to the most popular projects due to the overhead involved. We handle marketing, distribution, licensing, payments, payouts and more. If you are someone who can do all of that himself, and has the reach and marketing skills to reach an audience - you don't need a service like us. From our experience (before we even started this service), most developers do not have those abilities.

You should also consider seed funding. If the Open source project is in good shape and has a viable business model, you could seed fund and take some equity.

I am from India, and it is really difficult to raise even a small amount of money here. The deal I was offered by a Seed Investment firm was - give us 5% stake (for 0 investment) and we will prepare you for seed funding. This is how bad it is here: I have working compilers and a client.

What I was looking for from seed funding was about Rs 50,000 a month which is about USD 1000 a month, so that I can work full time on my project and move it forward.

Interesting point. We're considering something along those lines - a crowdfunding option for open-source projects, i.e, kickstarter for open-source. The problem with pre-funding a project, is that it's much harder to create interest (unless you hit a very common, painful need) vs. an existing solution that can be used right now. We'll be looking into it more in the future.

My point was along the lines of something like nginx (before it was commercialised), a growing open source project. If you felt you could make a business off nginx, you could have approached the author directly made an investment and taken some equity.

I've checked out binpress a few times before and they do have some interesting stuff. I say its more like a source code marketplace, which makes it easy for code authors to sell small utilities and libraries at no or low cost. I hope they succeed and become more popular, since sometimes it is very difficult to find easy to license source code.

I've been looking for a service like this for my Open Source project. We started out wanting to make this a business. I hope your idea takes off and I will browse around your site to figure out how to submit my project

Glad to hear it. If you have specific questions, feel free to reach out to eran[at]our domain.com

Sure it can, but the donations need to be bigger, then you can quit your job and get a new job in Open-Source. But that can lead to financial troubles if the donations stop...

I always wonder: Why not try to sell Open-Source-Software. For example The Gimp, sell it via the Ubuntu Software-Center, maintain the current version, maybe pack it with some great plugins and done. I am sure there are quite a few people willing to pay for that service.

Gimp is the perfect example in my oppinion, because it's such a great project without decent funding. Imagine what the could achieve with better funding.

You may want to check Chupamobile out. It is the only marketplace 100% focused on source code for Mobile apps. Authors in the marketplace are already making thousands a month.

Can the generated licenses be used without signing up for binpress?

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