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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

Unless "apt-get install" starts deducting BTC from your wallet.dat, charging money for open source software isn't worth it. The revenue collected is minuscule, yet it reduces adoption and fragments the community. People use free forks instead of the "official" version.

There are better ways to monetize open source software: Consulting/support contracts. Bounties for features. Paid SaaS features. "Enterprise" features, such as turning Synergy into a mass remote admin tool. (I bet this would be handy in schools.)

It took me 30 seconds to think of those monetization ideas. I'm sure Nick Bolton can come up with better ones.

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Your argument doesn't address the parent's first point, that many customers hesitate or refuse to use free software. By having paid downloads from their main front, they can market to these people, and use them to generate a modest amount of revenue that would otherwise not exist.

So you offer those people a paid support contract upfront.

* Click here to download Synergy with support ($4.99)

* Click here to download Synergy with no support (free)

It's common to call the no-support option the "community" version.

We tried that a while ago. It turns out, around 90% of Synergy users are very technical (fellow Software Engineers and the like). Often technical people aren't that interested in support because they prefer to figure stuff out for themselves (because we find it fun). Synergy does have a private help desk that Synergy users can contact for troubleshooting, but users that contact the help desk are often less technical (when it comes to Synergy troubleshooting).

Most Synergy users don't use repos, or Linux for that matter, so this new model works for Synergy (though, it probably wouldn't so well for a Linux-only project). Also, repos tend to have much older versions (at least in Synergy's case).

> It took me 30 seconds to think of those

> The revenue collected is minuscule

I think it also took you 30 seconds to assume that. Also, the dev already was doing various ways to get income from businesses, including some which you posted.

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