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Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

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Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#41

Post by acdha »

jashmenn wrote: post #31

Because monetizing your open-source project means you take on a second job. Here are your choices: * Turn your OSS project into a company (Docker). The pro is that you can capture a lot of the value, the con is that you're splitting your project into CE/EE and also now you're a CEO * Give the software away for free and charge for the hosting (Gitlab). Pro here is that you get recurring revenue, but the con is that no…

> it's one-time revenue, you have potentially inflated expectations, and just kidding, now you have 1,000 bosses.

I think this dynamic applies pretty widely and it's part of a major problem throughout the open-source community. There are many people who feel entitled to custom development tailored to their exact needs for free or close to it; that population is both considerably larger than the number of people who will contribute at all, much less significantly, and a substantial percentage of them communicate in a rude and entitled manner which contributes to burnout for the actual contributors.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#42

Post by techspring »

stevefeinstein wrote: post #20

Because not everyone is a self serving greedy objectivist dick. Some see a benefit in contributing to a shared collective good.

I considered not replying to this just based on the tone, but here we go. If I (theoretically) charge large corporations for SLA support, that means I can devote more time and effort to the project which remains free to use for the collective. The result is a higher quality product with better support at no added cost to anyone but those that desire a higher level of support. Does that make me (again, theoretically) a self serving greedy objectivist dick?

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#43

Post by [deleted] »

mrleinad wrote: post #26
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #19

I've tried it. I've failed at it. Halite is a libsodium wrapper for PHP projects that emphasizes ease-of-use and difficulty to misuse: https://github.com/paragonie/halite CMS Airship is a secure-by-default content management system (think WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.): https://github.com/paragonie/airship Both projects are released under GPL but offer commercial licenses. In two years, I've only had one person eve…

Do you have any stats on how many people use the first two products?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#44

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Motivation? Programming has always had a strong undercurrent of sharing. Programmers want to read the code. Programmers want to share how they accomplished something.

That being said, you will likely get different answers on HN than you would on, say, r/programming or IRC.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#45

Post by franciscop »

indigochill wrote: post #39
franciscop wrote: post #14

To answer this I would ask what is the biggest reason to do Open Source. As an individual, the main reason to do that last step and publishing what I do as open source is so other people can use+benefit from it and monetizing it would hinder this. Now there are many great secondary reasons as an individual, in no particular order: I learn a lot, I got some paying gigs from my open source, better code through more eye…

Another reason some companies publish open source code is to recruit contributors. Contributors already know what they're doing and are clearly passionate enough about the product to spend time on it for free, so they may be a natural hire when a position opens.

Well put, I see that as a combination of "better code through more eyeballs" and "great recruiting tool".

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#46

Post by bad_user »

Ologn wrote: post #38
bad_user wrote: post #28

People don't pay unless forced to do it. In other works, people only pay when there's scarcity . What drives our economy? Scarcity. What's the long term effect of capitalism? Commoditization, i.e. driving the costs down. Some people view open source as being about a post-scarcity economy in which human labor isn't need, an economy based on abundance. That's bullshit though. Open source is about commoditizing software…

> What drives our economy? Scarcity... Some people view open source as being about a post-scarcity economy in which human labor isn't need, an economy based on abundance. That's bullshit though. I don't think that is the case at all. If I have a woodshop and a customer comes in and hands me wood and nails, and I spend a day banging together a table for them, at the end of the day there is one table. A scarce good - o…

> If I have a woodshop and a customer comes in and hands me wood and nails, and I spend a day banging together a table for them, at the end of the day there is one table. A scarce good - one table is created, no more.

That's natural scarcity. We also have artificial scarcity imposed by laws and technology.

If you think that's unfair, I might agree morally speaking, but then we'd end up talking about how we're actually debating Marx's "labor theory of value" (i.e. value is given by the total amount of labor required to produce it), which was fundamentally flawed.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#47

Post by techspring »

franciscop wrote: post #14

To answer this I would ask what is the biggest reason to do Open Source. As an individual, the main reason to do that last step and publishing what I do as open source is so other people can use+benefit from it and monetizing it would hinder this. Now there are many great secondary reasons as an individual, in no particular order: I learn a lot, I got some paying gigs from my open source, better code through more eye…

In general, my thought is that by finding an unobtrusive way to generate revenue you can devote more time to the project and produce a higher quality, better supported product. This of course necessitates that the project is valuable enough to justify spending additional resources on making it significantly better.

In my mind, the best revenue model for OSS is something that is opt-in. For example, if a company wants to pay for enhanced support they can, but if not they can use the software and rely on community/best-effort support.

The main goal in my mind should be making greater resources available to the project while still allowing free use.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#48

Post by techspring »

kazinator wrote: post #25

> but it seems like there are very few projects that even attempt to monetize via dual-licensing, service contracts, etc. You don't know everything about the activities of open-source developers with regard to their project. They may be involved in service contracts and dual licensing, without that being advertised on their project site.

That's fair. My observation is admittedly entirely anecdotal.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#49

Post by iamwil »

orthecreedence wrote: post #34

I run an open source project (turtlapp.com). I want to monetize. I have people who tell me fairly often they want to pay for it. There are two things that hold me back. First is never quite feeling like it's ready to charge for (perfect being the enemy of good). Second is I don't know how much time I can devote to supporting it. Both are stupid reasons. I know this. I'm hoping to launch a premium service soon, and we…

Just start charging. You'll want to know earlier rather than later which one it is. Life is short. If it turns out this is not the thing you should be working on, knowing which one it is will free your mind up to do something else you should be doing.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#50

Post by moron4hire »

stevefeinstein wrote: post #20

Because not everyone is a self serving greedy objectivist dick. Some see a benefit in contributing to a shared collective good.

This attitude is one of the biggest reasons why it's so hard to monetize open source software. There are a lot of open source devs that missed it wasn't meant to be "free as in gratis".
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