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On paying for software

seths.blog

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Re: On paying for software

#31

Post by tormeh »

pjmlp wrote: post #10
open-source-ux wrote: post #6

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…

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 anoth…

I don't think the primary problem is cost, but that when you build your product tightly coupled with a propretary product that is hard to migrate off of then the vendor of that product can shake you down, or they can go bankrupt or what have you. It makes your business vulnerable, and no one wants that.

Also your production environment crashing because a license expired. Fun times.

Re: On paying for software

#32

Post by mherrmann »

greysteil wrote: post #30
mherrmann wrote: post #9

As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

Great blog post - thanks for writing it. I've had the same experience with people asking for an MIT license on dependabot-core (the public repo that holds the core logic for my SaaS business, but which has no license and a comment saying those who wish to use it for commercial gain should contact me instead). I already give the product away for free to open source projects and anyone using it in a personal capacity,…

I very much agree, especially on your point that the world is better for you being able to work on your product.

Re: On paying for software

#33

Post by tormeh »

mcny wrote: post #20
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Do you really expect people to pay for something when they can get it for free? Making software open source means you are either selling something complementary (hardware, other software, services) or else begging for crumbs.

I don't know much about these things and I'm making this up as we go but I wonder if we can use AGPL or a stronger version of AGPL. Basically, you pay for a subscription or everything on your servers that touches this software must be free and open source. Should work for researchers and students and there is a continued revenue stream. For example, require any software that talks to a rest API also be foss. With mor…

Many companies already do this. See Mobicents, which we use at my current job.

Re: On paying for software

#34

Post by matheusmoreira »

mherrmann wrote: post #9

As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

Paying for software may be moral, but it certainly isn't natural. As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.

Re: On paying for software

#35

Post by theshadowknows »

mherrmann wrote: post #9

As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

I don’t understand when people complain about software that isn’t free. You want it free? Go make it yourself and give it away...oh, you can’t make it yourself? Maybe that’s why it’s not free.

Re: On paying for software

#36

Post by gitgud »

mherrmann wrote: post #9

As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

Amazing how you have to justify getting money for work. Reminds me of the Nomad List article.

"Why isn't Nomad List free?"

https://nomadlist.com/help

Re: On paying for software

#37

Post by xstartup »

There are many areas where you can create opensource projects, for example, SaaS subscription management platform with plenty of payment, tax, fraud detection plugins.

Last time I heard there are so many SaaS indie developers forced to add WHMCS, amember pro or Woocomerce/Shopify for collecting payments using crypto, stripe, and PayPal. I mean, these platforms aren't for SaaS!

Then offer a hosted version which implements high availability, load balancing, robust failproof backups.

Most developers start their projects in areas which are unlikely to pay off, I don't blame them for this as it's something they find interesting but we shouldn't expect the market to pay for our interest.

Re: On paying for software

#39

Post by paulcole »

merb wrote: post #28
mherrmann wrote: post #9

As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

I can understand how you feel and I also think your blog post is correct in many ways. However I think software should be reasonably priced which is most often not the case. And also people can't pay everybody 5-10 dollar/euro for everything, we would quickly need to pay thousands of dollars/euros yearly to access/use everything. That's why I think sometimes having another way of "paying", like through ads or maybe s…

Maybe you just need fewer $5-10 dollar/month things than you think? At that price you could have 100-200 of them before “quickly” needing to pay thousands of dollars yearly.

Re: On paying for software

#40

Post by kaibee »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #34
mherrmann wrote: post #9

As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/

Paying for software may be moral , but it certainly isn't natural . As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update…

> but it certainly isn't natural.

So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.

> It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model.

It's a social construct that we've adopted in society because it allows for things we like.

> The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.

This is a valid business model for some games, but there are many games that would not exist without such a model. I'd prefer that those games exist instead of insisting that reality should be the way that fits nicely with my arbitrary mental models.

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