On paying for software

Most of the “software” mentioned in the post, are actually services (slack, zoom, tidal, etc). For many people, it is easier to accept to pay for a service rather than software.

While I do use paid services, I usually “pay” (donate) for free and open source software. Why? It helps me get my work done, support is usually good, I set the price and I know that people who aren't as fortunate as I (being able to afford to buy software) can use it for free and get the same opportunities as me. :)

I believe corporate red tape one of reasons to not-pay for a software licence. If you download the trial or non commercial edition, works for you, you would never go through chain of approvals to buy a cheap software.Meare player is an example that you can think of. Araxis merge, Visual studio, Visio are some to name a few.

Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Are the available options stacked against them?

Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients using open source software. But what if you don't want to be a consultant and simply want to charge a business for using your open source product?

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can sell your free software by charging for distribution (for example via CD-ROMs). Physical media made sense in an era of dial-up modems and low-bandwidth connections, but no-one can realistically charge for distribution today - not least when so many projects are hosted for free on GitHub. See: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

So what are the alternatives?

- There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. (Naturally doesn't work with permissive licences. Requires a strong copyleft licence like the GPL).

- The open core approach e.g. GitLab.

- There's also the option of charging for support only - I'm guessing this is an unattractive and unappealing option for many developers who'd much rather be building their product.

- Or there's the Kickstarter or Patreon approach which simply isn't a stable, sustainable long-term solution.

There have been some alternative licence approaches such as the Fair Source licence (fair.io). This is neither open source or closed source but allows developers to charge for their software.

The large market for Wordpress plugins is an interesting case study. Wordpress is published under the GPL v2, but many Wordpress plugins are not open source. No one polices this, but those plugin developers are selling their software to businesses who are willing to pay for the features of those plugins.

So who here in 2018 has made a success selling their open source software? Did you follow one of the models above? And who has struggled to make it work?

Depends on where you work. I've been in shops where developers had a certain amount of money -- $500 or $1000 -- to buy whatever work-related tools they deemed to be helpful in getting their jobs done. Those tools could be software (Beyond Compare and ReSharper being popular ones) or hardware (monitors!) and up to that amount there were essentially no questions asked (the only caveat being if you spent on stuff that was not needed you risked ruining it for everyone else so you ran the risk of a getting a Code Red from the dev team if you wanted to spend wastefully). As much as companies spend on finding and keeping good developers, dropping $1k/each per year for things that make them happy is chump change.

As someone that was part of an effort to do this in the early .com days, it is a lost hope trying to sell open source software to consumers.

While selling to enterprise can be made via consulting and training, most consumers just want a one time shot paying for their software.

Well, if you do that with commercial software, usually the only way to avoid paying is piracy.

In open source world, they can just go to another guy that is re-packaging your work and making it available for free, thus killing your source of income.

Which is the major reason most desktop software shops are going the store model, hoping that higher control will prevent that kind of workaround (which doesn't work with rooted devices anyway), or forcing consumers to migrate to a SaaS like in the good old timesharing days.

I might add that FOSS developers are the first to blame, as contrary to most professions, many go to great lenghts to avoid paying anything, while feeling entitled their costumers pay them.

I am overgeneralizing here, but you see it every time someone comes up with licensing changes as means to be able to keep working on the product that they love, right away the forum gets flooded with free beer alternatives and vocal complaints how everyone is going to migrate to something else.