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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

If you saw the per-SKU numbers I can guarantee you that you would weep. They're virtually guaranteed to have a power law distribution. The median game has sales of zero, the median game of those games with sales above zero makes the creator less than a single dinner worth of contributions per month, and so forth.

I'm an investor in a company which does a marketplace for commercial OSS. It is not accurate that OSS makes no money. Many individual OSS projects make no money, because they're optimized for making no money by people who think, consciously or otherwise, that making money from software is evil. OSS projects which are more commercial in nature ROFLstomp over web games with a donation model.

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Having a brain that thinks "commercial OSS" is an oxymoron (and I can see it waving a red flag and building barricades in the back of my head) I would be interested in how people / market places are squaring that circle - could you point us at your investment?

Also are you saying that OSS projects that use a donation model do better than indie games (irrespective of the indie game model) or is it both doing donation models.

I speak as someone who wants to keep developing OSS but also likes getting paid.

Open source projects using a donation model tend to do roughly as well as games using a donation model. And both tend to do roughly as well as the guy standing next to the offramp using a donation model.

Open source projects using a model where people pay for the software tend to do nicely, however. The distinction in what you pay for can be as simple as "you're now officially allowed to use this in a commercial product" or "in addition to the paid version, we also offer a completely free* version" (where "free" is defined by some insane guy and his cult from the 70s to mean something completely orthagonal to "free", in a completely non-standard way seemingly designed to raise red flags with your company's legal department)

Yep.

One very prominent example, which drives most of the sales at Binpress (the company I invested in, which I mention only to identify them rather than for promotion): if you GPL a library, that makes the entire app that includes that library not saleable on the App Store. This doesn't make the library useless, because you can still use it in internal applications or pre-release versions of your app, but "We need to ship to the App Store" is a fairly big bullet point for a lot of potential customers of e.g. a SDK which lets you edit PDF files on an iDevice in an arbitrary application. That particular feature occurs in a lot of enterprise apps, because the enterprise runs on PDFs. So if you say "Totally free for your geeks to use internally, and btw, $2500 if they want to put it on the App Store", you'll collect more in a single license sale than 99.99% of donationware apps make in a month.

This is called the dual licensing model. Mechanically, you control the copyright to the code, release it under GPL, and -- in parallel -- release it under a commercial license which restricts what people can do with it but which is "non-viral."

I'm in two minds about binpress. I think the direct sales model seems more consumer / SME orientated whereas I feel all the money in dual licensing lies in large companies wanting to cover themselves for licensing audits.

So there are (IIRC) a few companies offering approved reviewed versions of OSS code (ie Firefox built by them and they checked it is properly signed source code etc). But I don't know of anyone doing this approach

It should be interesting - but their python offering - oh dear. Really oh dear. If that's indicative then I would suggest they start to niche down for a while. Focus on medical OSS or Govt OSS instead of everyone and everything. Attract specifics

I wish them well, I just am worried.

What would you suggest if your OS project was bound to MIT and there's no way of introducing a commercial license?

heatmap.js (my pet project) unfortunately has those constraints and I'm currently trying a mixed model of high priced premium support and donations.

Donations got me almost nothing, high priced premium support got me a few hundred dollars within a few weeks after I introduced it- more than I made the last 4 years with donations.

I'm also trying binpress as a secondary channel to sell support. will see how it performs over time, but binpress looks promising so far

Take two of your most commonly requested features which are only useful for enterprise users, add them to Heatmap.js Commercial, charge $500 a year for it, and promote Heatmap.js Commercial along with heatmap.js. I don't know what those features would be for heatmaps, but I strongly suspect it will sound like "integrates with ... out of the box."

Basically, wholesale clone sidekiq's model. They're also on MIT, and he does pretty well for himself.

You can still sell a MIT licenced version. It's just that, unlike the GPL, it's possible for someone to use it on (say) App Store without having to pay.

Love the off ramp metaphor :-) thank you

Many commercial OSS offer paid support or support an "Enterprise" version of the OSS product. Zenoss ([http://www.zenoss.com/]) is a good example of this.

Personally, I see OSS projects that have this business plan as less risky since they are less likely to stagnate due to exhaustion.

See also MySQL and PostgreSQL. They are open source and have free community editions, but they have paid enterprise features and support for those who need more than a database for their Wordpress site.

The donation model is almost never a good idea if your goal is to actually receive income.

"commerical" = makes money / sold. "OSS" = open source. Just sell open source programmes. Red Hat and Mozilla sells lots of open source programmes.

Off the top of my head, sidekiq, ansible and saltstack are fully open source but also make money.

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