101–110 of 454 posts
I see way too much focus on the value of whatever they're selling and no focus at all on what else I could do with that money. I'd gladly pay $8 or $10 a year for a good bookmarking service, but not $45.
I wonder what would happen if someone started an open source software "vendor" run along the lines of public radio / podcasts. Open source licensed (using a regular GPL or other license, nothing new or tricky), but a prominent encouragement to donate it you find it useful. Those donations could then be used to hire full-time developers, and work on the kinds of software that is currently not well served by open-sourc…
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…
Have you tried the "progress bar to this month's target" strategy? May even be worth it to count your contribution in to that to seed the bar so it's not zero.
Isn't it odd that a piece of software, could be widely deployed, forked, starred on Github etc. etc. and yet with all this infrastructure there is no mechanism to ensure that any money finds its way back to the creators unless they ask for it? Some kinds of business people praise the selfless creativity of the open source community while simultaneously conserving their own profits and often denouncing taxation as theft. When challenged, such people attribute all human progress to the profit motive, and thereby in part to themselves, in manifest disregard of the facts. Creative people don't like this but they need to eat and keep a roof over their head, which requires money.
On the one hand, creative people with a mindset of mutual aid and consequent abundance, whose genius expands and structures much of our economy. On the other, well-resourced people who preach a gospel of scarcity and systematically give less than they take. These same people denounce any interference in their profit-making, and choke the unfortunate with externalities because they refuse to bear the cost of cleaning up their own waste, often going so far as to deceive the public about its existence.
How are open source creators any different from blacksmiths, forging the very chains and weapons which bind and oppress them? How much life must be given away, how much filth heaped on heads, before creators will unstop their ears to the laughter of those who exploit and rule over them, mocking their generous spirits and diligent efforts?
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 configurat…
Honestly I can’t see the cloud making sense for another decade.
NVidia’s new hobby board for $99 + open source has me imagining a future where someone like myself can offer similar experiences to Alexa or a number of Googley features to family and friends in a few years.
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
30% includes all payment processing costs and other costs for both users and projects, so there is a flat 70% remaining for projects that doesn't get deducted further. We do this to keep things simple and make it clear how much projects can get.
Payment processing alone costs $0.3 + 3% with Stripe, so at $10/month that's a fixed $0.6 out of the $3 we take. The other $2.4 needs to accommodate the fees to send money to each of the projects + infrastructure costs. Not sure how to account for that but assuming at scale around $0.4/user/month, we're looking at $2/user/month in profit. Assuming sustainability is reached at $200,000, that is approximately 8300 people giving to open source through this. That is high but seems approachable.
Does that seem reasonable? My objective with this is to build something that increases the pool of people who contribute but also ensure the underlying project can stay afloat indefinitely with the right incentives.
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…
> There's a big of a 'tragedy of the commons' here with the donations aren't coming in because everyone assumes someone else will donate. Have you tried the "progress bar to this month's target" strategy? May even be worth it to count your contribution in to that to seed the bar so it's not zero.
I'm planning on hitting a usability milestone first as I have a few big changes planned (new webapp, some important features, new chrome extension, etc).
Then I'm going to make a pitch for this and include a fundraiser bar in the app.
Especially business people who resell the code to their customers without ANY investment into actually creating something or paying people with talent who do things that make the world a better place.
Why would the world properly value our contribution if WE don't value our contribution?
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…
But I very rarely get donations. Previous appeals on social media for donations have resulted in small bumps that quickly fade, so I'm focused more on trying to get subscription donors. Lately I've had some luck finding two business sponsors and now my Patreon at least covers the server costs. I think it's true what others said- in order to persuade these businesses I had to add a "sponsored by" section on the site with their logos. Ads, basically.
The 'tragedy of the commons' is definitely a thing. I'd be happy if people at least contributed new entries, photos, reviews, and comments to the website, but less than 1% of users actually do so.
Anyway, my next steps are to cold-call more potential business sponsors as well as to try selling merchandise related to the domain. If I can't get to about $1k/mo. this year I might need to just pull myself away from the project for my own financial stability and sanity.
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…