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Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
311–320 of 454 posts
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#312I think it was designed to make money: sell the actual software. RMS used to sell free copies of Emacs: for 100 bucks, you'd get Emacs, the source code, the documentation, and the necessary scripts to compile it. This was always part of the definition of free software, which open source inherited. It's just that selling like this is more difficult now that there's a high-speed internet for everyone, but I think more…
Another thing, so much of the FOSS world is nonprofit. It is very hard for a for-profit company to give money to a non-profit. I don't know the why, but I have witnessed a few instances and basically non-profit donations have to come from the donations budget and that budget is usually orders of magnitude smaller than budgets designated for purchasing and also usually shared by the entire company and thus quickly depleted.
If there were either a intermediate broker or if FOSS companies elected to a for-profit status than they could easily accept donations.
In the US, creating an LLC only takes the conscious effort of will to decide you want to make an LLC and is a for-profit model, so it isn't too hard to make.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Donations are not tax-deductible for now. We might do that later if people ask for it. 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…
First thanks for doing this.I was actually looking for a good and efficient way to give back to OSS. 30 % seems more inline with apps store etc... which are closed, for profit entities. Other crowd founding venue charge around 5 % which is the level i would personally feel comfortable with. The way the donation are distributed is interesting and seem to be geared toward people wanted to give back to communities on wh…
>Other crowd founding venue charge around 5 % which is the level i would personally feel comfortable with.
5% is $0.5 which right off the bat assumes payment processing is separate. That's fine if people prefer that but even then $0.5 is barely enough to cover infrastructure. How do we pay for someone to maintain that infrastructure? This is the same issue OSS is facing but on the other side. No one wins when the tools we rely on don't have a sustainable business model. I don't think 5% is sustainable as we've seen with Patreon's recent increase.
>Personally i am looking for a way to give to project i use the most, (firefox, vim , zsh etc...) and also project that i use and particularly need funding.
Yea this mostly geared towards libraries and frameworks not apps.
>Any plans for the entreprise market ?
Enterprise is an important market but I was hoping to get some early adopters to prove the idea first and then use that proof to get businesses to join. Not opposed to doing both in parallel though.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
>and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. The GUI of their OS at that time is still superior to what linux desktop provides us with today.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "at that time". My current Linux desktop (Xfce) is way better than Win95 or Win2k. I stopped using Windows around then, so I can't comment on WinXP or newer.
I think arguably a current Linux distro/desktop designed for non-technical users is better for them than Win95 or Win2k was.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. Open Source software was never meant to pay the bills of open source developers, it was meant to open source code to the public and allow free use. To somehow read this narrative that indie developers are losing because others profit from their work is facile and…
> It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. For the most part, any developer who is good enough to create e.g. Redis and be hired could easily have skipped the "create Redis" part and just get hired in the first place, for far greater return on investment. That's not even getting into the fact that leadin…
> For example, Google rejected the creator of Homebrew, despite getting a lot of value out of the software, because of problems with whiteboard coding.
Of course, it's important to note that that is his interpretation of the process. He did do a short stint at Apple at some point, too, so it's not like he didn't end up getting hired anyways.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#316Its 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…
Yeah. I really want to go back to managing my own database servers and ElasticSearch servers....
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. For the most part, any developer who is good enough to create e.g. Redis and be hired could easily have skipped the "create Redis" part and just get hired in the first place, for far greater return on investment. That's not even getting into the fact that leadin…
> For example, Google rejected the creator of Homebrew, despite getting a lot of value out of the software, because of problems with whiteboard coding. Of course, it's important to note that that is his interpretation of the process. He did do a short stint at Apple at some point, too, so it's not like he didn't end up getting hired anyways.
Regardless of whether it was fair or unfair to not hire him, the point remains that OSS doesn't guarantee getting hired.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example, Google rejected the creator of Homebrew, despite getting a lot of value out of the software, because of problems with whiteboard coding. Of course, it's important to note that that is his interpretation of the process. He did do a short stint at Apple at some point, too, so it's not like he didn't end up getting hired anyways.
Regardless of whether it was fair or unfair to not hire him, the point remains that OSS doesn't guarantee getting hired.
Sure, point taken.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. The GUI of their OS at that time is still superior to what linux desktop provides us with today.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "at that time". My current Linux desktop (Xfce) is way better than Win95 or Win2k. I stopped using Windows around then, so I can't comment on WinXP or newer. I think arguably a current Linux distro/desktop designed for non-technical users is better for them than Win95 or Win2k was.
I (a laymen) buy a random tablet pen, and it works immediately on windows. To get it to work on linux, may be there's already a driver, may be it's not supported. Either way, it's a gamble if it works on linux.
Tell me that windows isn't still better for the laymen?
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah. I really want to go back to managing my own database servers and ElasticSearch servers....
you get what you pay for. If you use managed services from a vendor, you get convenience for the price of lock-in.