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However, I wonder if there's anyone here who makes decent money selling software components or code "the old way".
Please share your stories.
(I'm also interested in hearing the buyer's side, so please mention useful code/software that you had bought).
You could regard themes for WordPress as software components. Or theme frameworks such as Genesis (studiopress.com).
The really successful ones (such as Genesis) seem to bundle software components with something like subscriptions to future updates, a paid membership site, additional content like ebooks, live seminars, training, support etc. to get additional income streams and be able to upsell or cross-sell customers.
Game engines or mobile development frameworks (KendoUI, Sencha) that can be licensed also fall under selling software components. Again, the successful ones seem to offer additional resources or they sell their components in a one-year-license model, where customers have to renew the license every year. That would be more or less the same as SaaS in terms of recurring revenue and keeping customers in the loop.
I'm a developer, I remember one time I needed to have a particular piece of functionality in an app. I could have built it, but I found that someone was selling what I wanted for $3.00 on the internet, it was a no-brainer. I paid with something like gumroad, downloaded and plugged it in within a matter of minutes, vs the few hours I would have spent writing/debugging.
I'm a developer, I remember one time I needed to have a particular piece of functionality in an app. I could have built it, but I found that someone was selling what I wanted for $3.00 on the internet, it was a no-brainer. I paid with something like gumroad, downloaded and plugged it in within a matter of minutes, vs the few hours I would have spent writing/debugging.
That's interesting. As you say, it's a no-brainer. I wonder if some kind of micropayment market in functions could be pulled off... The kind of thing Ted Nelson or Jaron Lanier talk about, only for small pieces of reusable code rather than small pieces of reusable text.
Throwing money into that dynamic is opening all kinds of worm cans.
We have several developers making SV comparable salaries from publishing on our platform (in the 100k$ range annually). I believe this can be a huge market - if you look at companies selling licenses to code or SDK binaries, there's quite a few who built very profitable businesses around it.
Very well known examples of companies selling code licenses include MySQL and Magento (through their enterprise versions), though they provide complete solutions and not components. Gravity Forms (http://www.gravityforms.com/) a wordpress plug-in, is another good example - it generated millions in revenue if you trust their installation counter.
Another strategy, though from what I can tell with declining popularity, is to write a GPL-licensed open-source library, and then sell proprietary licenses to companies who prefer those terms. Two random examples: http://www.juce.com/documentation/commercial-licensing http://www.cgal.org/license.html
I'm a developer, I remember one time I needed to have a particular piece of functionality in an app. I could have built it, but I found that someone was selling what I wanted for $3.00 on the internet, it was a no-brainer. I paid with something like gumroad, downloaded and plugged it in within a matter of minutes, vs the few hours I would have spent writing/debugging.