61–70 of 131 posts
Free as in un-bound software.
I've been encouraging a 5% philosophy for organizations that replace software that had license fees with free software: Just donate 5% of the previous annual license fee to the project you're now using, each year. You still save 95% on license fees and developers get to eat.
Following the example of Sidekiq (with Sidekiq Pro), I'm in the process of launching a commercial offering for Kiba ETL (OSS Ruby ETL framework - http://www.kiba-etl.org ), dubbed "Kiba Pro". My take on this is that more developers could try to follow that path, but we lack a bit of guidance (I'm lucky Mike Perham provided some useful insights to guide me actually) to reduce the anxiety & uncertainty associated with…
I would love any further feedback you can share.
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…
So suppose you actually manage get paid despite all that -- how do you distribute money fairly? This is a huge problem can could actually slow the project down by leading to hurt feelings. Ironically, it's almost better for the group if nobody gets paid.
Corporations have evolved all sorts of imperfect systems to solve this problem, but it comes at a tremendous cost (performance reviews, interviews, firing, all of HR essentially).
But the open source model of collaboration follows the principle of "least bureaucracy". It throws out all these "coordination costs" in the name of just getting the job done. No more and no less.
Because monetizing any business is really really hard. I work on Standard Notes ( https://standardnotes.org ), which is an encrypted notes app (think of it as an encrypted Evernote alternative). It's fully open source, and I'm monetizing it through paid upgrades. While the progress is promising enough for me to continue working on it full time, nothing could have prepared me for how difficult this was going to be. I…
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…
Sounds like you might enjoy working at https://protocol.ai/
Following the example of Sidekiq (with Sidekiq Pro), I'm in the process of launching a commercial offering for Kiba ETL (OSS Ruby ETL framework - http://www.kiba-etl.org ), dubbed "Kiba Pro". My take on this is that more developers could try to follow that path, but we lack a bit of guidance (I'm lucky Mike Perham provided some useful insights to guide me actually) to reduce the anxiety & uncertainty associated with…
http://www.kiba-etl.org/ could use some work in stating the business problem and how Kiba can ease the pain of growing your own ETL. If you're not sure what an ETL is (or what problem they solve), the landing page provides 0 justification into reading more.
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…
that's not necessarily a bad thing. Those sound like libs with pretty simple responsibilities, so if they work great there may just not be any real opportunity for feature requests or feedback.
With a backported shim (like at least one of those), I'd honestly take a silent userbase as a sign of success if you know there are downloads/installs.