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

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

#141

Post by clarry »

macspoofing wrote: post #123
sanxiyn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freemium model is vastly more profitable. There is a reason every game company is switching to it.

>Freemium model is vastly more profitable. Is it? >There is a reason every game company is switching to it. Are they?

> >There is a reason every game company is switching to it.

> Are they?

No they aren't. It's more like a new market that has some overlap with the traditional offering.

There are tons and tons of people who will never be interested in freemium games, just as there are tons of people who aren't interested in mmorpgs or multiplayer in general.

That market isn't going away.

Just like the market for workstations and laptops didn't go away, even though people boldly proclaimed that mobile is eating the world and you can do anything on a phone.

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

#142

Post by newnewpdro »

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 :)

> Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS.

Are you aware of the F in FOSS being free as in libre/free speech?

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

#143

Post by gnat »

r_smart wrote: post #32
ckuhl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard before (can't remember where) that a lot of companies won't donate to a project, but would gladly pay for "marketing" if the project simply listed companies that donated to them. I'm not sure if that would be a feasible option, but I can definitely see the difference in value propositions.

I wonder if this is because the people in companies currently using open source aren't people with control over the purse-strings. They're the people focused on getting a product out the door. The marketing department on the other hand, expects to have to pay to put the company name on things. So naturally, they'd be happy being listed as a partner, sponsor, patron, etc.

No, more a function of businesses having obligations not to waste their shareholders' money. By definition, donations are optional things. A donation be heavily questioned afterward if it is allowed to go through at all. But buying marketing, or support, is a perfectly sensible thing for a business to do.

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

#144

Post by djakjxnanjak »

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…

> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors

The amount of value generated by open source software running on cloud providers may be much greater than the fees those providers are charging. It’s not a zero-sum game.

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

#145

Post by bad_user »

The problem of open source is one of scarcity. People don't pay for value, if that value can be obtained for free and without effort.

People pay for scarcity and our whole economic system is based on it. Open source unfortunately is the exact opposite.

Note that there are open source projects making money. For example Wordpress is GPL, which forces all plugins and themes to be GPL-compatible as well. And there are plenty of commercial plugins and themes selling quite well, all of them open source.

But that's not necessarily something Mozilla could emulate.

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

#146

Post by vharuck »

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…

Have you thought about selling support contracts? Any enhancements developed for one customer would benefit another, but they get the guarantee of bug fixes and custom features. Sure, they could hire any coder to do this, but who better to trust than the developer?

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

#147

Post by RIMR »

I think the most important take-away here isn't whether or not you can make a profit with Open Source solutions or not - the take-away is that whether or not a Open Source project is profitable or not is completely irrelevant when discussing the usefulness of said project.

It's like complaining that insulin isn't fun enough. Nobody taking insulin was trying to have fun.

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

#148

Post by coldtea »

anon1m0us wrote: post #132
anon1m0us wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

schadenfreude for all! Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. The world thought programmers were just a bunch of nerds to be taken advantage of. Microsoft said no. The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. The nerds got their way. They got free everything. And now the OSS worls is a convoluted mess. It cos…

What? You downvote because it wasn't obvious to you?

No, because it's random and mostly wrong ramblings.

> Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software.

Not really. They hated it for abusing their monopoly, and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS.

> Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily.

Not really. Some believed software must be free as in beer and speech, most didn't care. They certainly didn't hate MS for it.

>The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system.

Not really. They hated MS for monopoly abuse, a bad OS, too many viruses and security holes, few ways to look under the hood, and fucking forever with IE 6.

>The nerds got their way. They got free everything.

They just got the server. And a lot of the enterprise server is still MS. The desktop is still 90% MS and 10% macOS (with some insignificant Linux percentage). As for mobile it's 40% iOS and 60% Android, which technically it's still OSS, but not in any sense that matters besides the license (nobody cares much, and it's not developed by some community bazaar style, Google calls all the shots, and the good stuff -google apps- are not Open Source).

>And now the OSS worlds is a convoluted mess.

Not really.

>It costs way more to make Ruby on Rails work than just installing IIS and writing some C#.

Yeah, no. If anything RoR is famous for its ease of development. And it costs nothing (besides programmers, which you need in any case), which is why cash-strapped startups prefer RoR and other FOSS solutions over MS.

>Now those who said Microsoft was bullying them are the bullies.

Non sequitur.

>OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent.

Non sequitur. OSS is as free as ever (and better than ever).

>No one wants to pay for code at all anymore.

Less want to pay for code, though billions still buy software and pay for services.

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

#149

Post by christophilus »

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…

This just made me wonder: what if all of the major OSS companies joined forces, started a new cloud company whose purpose was to send revenue back to all of its underlying OSS projects. Each then promotes that cloud as its #1 recommended cloud, and use their collective visibility to grow that into a contender? One can dream...

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

#150

Post by ketzo »

dpau wrote: post #109
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…

I've been building & running a niche website since 2015 that requires around 20hrs/wk in support, social media, and continued software development (all code gpl on github). It's become one of the most (if not the most) used software resources in my community, and users seem appreciative of my efforts. But I very rarely get donations. Previous appeals on social media for donations have resulted in small bumps that qui…

This is speculative, but I think you have a real advantage being in a niche community. You say users seem appreciative of your efforts -- let them know who they're appreciating and exactly how they can best show their appreciation! I think a Wikipedia-style open letter or banner as another commenter suggested could really serve you well. If you let your community know, honest and ugly, that you can't continue to do this without support, you might get more traction.
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