Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

ianbicking.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 454 posts

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#91

Post by soulbadguy »

acolytic wrote: post #88

One thing I'm not seeing here is people giving freely simply because you created something they value. You will never become a billionaire through this mechanism but I suspect you can probably earn a decent living. The problem with this mechanism is that now each project is out on their own to advertise their needs and get donations. I'm actually experimenting in this space with SeedAndDew ( https://www.seedanddew.co…

Are the donations tax deductible ? How did you guys arrive at the 30% figure ? Seems quite high to me

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#92

Post by robenkleene »

burtonator wrote: post #52

I'm currently experimenting with this directly. Specifically trying to make Open Source sustainable but for a consumer project. I think Open Source really works for infrastructure projects and it's possible to do really well either working on a system like Kubernetes or Elasticsearch. Not so well for projects that are more focused on consumers. My app, Polar, is focused more on consumers and is an app for people to m…

Some really quick unsolicited feedback (while I acknowledge upfront I know nothing about your business except what I gleaned from 10 seconds on your website): You say your model is "freemium" but I don't see a way to pay for anything on your website? That's not freemium, that's donationware. I'm not aware of any business like yours (consumer-focused desktop software) that's been successful as donationware, are you? If not don't expect to be the first.

I wouldn't read into the survey results, while better than nothing, look at what people do, not what they say they'll do. The survey results are great if you want to dig into the subconscious rationalizations people have for not donating, but it's not going to help actually get people to pay. Instead look for real-life examples of products like yours that people are paying an amount for that you'd be satisfied with (if you have examples like these I'd love to see them, I'd love for the model you're trying to actually be viable, I've just never seen it succeed).

Finally, the business model for this product seems obvious to me: Charge a subscription for users that want to use sync more X than some threshold Y.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#93

Post by bunderbunder »

mythz wrote: post #86

Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…

I'm starting to suspect that the major cloud vendors are well along on pulling a classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" gambit on that front.

I'm sure there are a percentage of people operating in the cloud who stick judiciously to an open-source stack, and remain masters of their own future as a result. But it seems more common to spread some open source icing on top of a cake made out of ingredients like Beanstalk, Redshift, S3, Lambda, etc. (Or name your favorite non-Amazon cloud vendor's equivalent.) Those companies may be just as locked into their closed-source software vendor of choice as people were locked into Microsoft or IBM or whoever back in the 1990s.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#94

Post by nicodjimenez »

Open source doesn't make money for the same reason music doesn't make money. It's very hard to charge for content directly nowadays. What people do pay for is user experience. The money in open source flows to cloud hosted open source services on AWS / Azure, the money in music content goes to Spotify, the money in TV shows goes to Netflix, ...

Agree / disagree?

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#95

Post by hinkley »

hinkley wrote: post #89
craigsmansion wrote: post #36

Maybe Mozilla could do with a bit less money. They've been playing serious business for some time now, but it's pretty much been borrowed feathers. Firefox got big because of early enthusiasts who believed in a better web. That got them enough clout to get google interested, and google basically gave them large piles of money. Somehow that gave them the idea they were a "real business" now, and they started spending…

From what I understand, a bunch of the long lived charities put their donations in the bank and live off of the interest. You get more donations by pretending like the money is for your new program, but it's only indirectly so (more assets equals more operating capital). If Mozilla didn't do that, their biggest opportunities for setting up and endowment are in the past and it won't go well for them in the future.

Well, fuck. In 2017 they operated at almost 120% of income:

> Overall, Mozilla invested $24M in this work in 2017. Total revenue and income support to the Mozilla Foundation in CY 2017 was $20.6M.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#97

Post by jjeaff »

mythz wrote: post #86

Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…

I think you are mostly right, but I don't think the major cloud providers have much of an uncrossable moat. Cloud services are and will continue to become more and more commoditized.

Sure, there is proprietary lock-in. But because of OSS, it is also becoming easy to avoid the lock-in. For example, rather than use a hosted elastic service, I was able to launch an elastic stack on k8s in less than an hour of configuration. It's able to scale up and down in the cluster and do everything I need. So if I need to easily change providers, all I need is someone who offers hosted k8s (or any provider if I decide to self manage down the line). We are in the process of doing the same with our DB and will migrate from a hosted Aurora instance.

It looks like ovh is now offering managed k8s. DO just launched theirs, countless others have as well or are about to.

I am running on gke right now because it was easiest. But there will be little keeping me from migrating down the road since k8s + helm + a few other tools are making it easier and easier to launch your own services.

I imagine if it doesn't exist yet, someone will create a nifty little tool to connect up two separate k8s clusters and seemlessly migrate everything over. There are few barriers to keep that from happening.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#98

Post by DonHopkins »

Insanity wrote: post #35
est31 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot engine has this model. They are getting donations from patreon [1], enough to pay 2 people full time at the center of the project. Wikipedia is another project which is doing this very successfully. But in general, those methods bring you much less money than if you were proprietary, because as you rightfully point out, most people are "freeloaders". [1]: https://www.patreon.com/godotengine

to nitpick, but to me the term 'freeloaders' has a negative connotation and I don't think it should in the case of FOSS. Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS. Apart from that, you make good points :)

Openloaders? ;)

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#99

Post by Kuraj »

I've had this idea in my head for some time but I wonder when browsers will start suppressing address bar content changes while the input is active and it's in the "dirty" state.

It's really annoying to make a typo, realize it, try to correct it, and ending up hitting return on a malformed url AGAIN because the site finished loading in the meantime.

Post reply on HN