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#2I'd love to hear any thoughts or opinions on this post, and on my blog in general!
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#3I cannot be the only person who thought this would be about the free software movement (e.g. GNU) rather than the movement towards software being released gratis.
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#4There's no relation between "the free software movement" and "freemium."
Also, freemium is only a special case of discounting where price is zero. There's a whole spectrum of discount pricing strategies. And there's a large number of other models as well.
And here's the worst thing: all of the different monetization models have lots and lots of products and companies. It's not just freemium that's crowded. It's a tough world out there and you're going to have to really impress. You're going to have to fight for your customers. Period.
First, make something useful. Get some people to use it. If you have people wanting what you've got then you need to figure out how to monetize it well. Which way you monetize it has a lot to do with your specific product and your customers. It may be freemium, or it may be charge a big fee up front, or anything in between.
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#5I cannot be the only person who thought this would be about the free software movement (e.g. GNU) rather than the movement towards software being released gratis .
You weren't.
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#6I'd love to hear any thoughts or opinions on this post, and on my blog in general!
As several people have pointed out, within the community of software developers, the term "free software movement" instantly brings to mind Richard Stallman and the GNU project much more than the topic you are actually writing about. I was expecting something like "FOSS is dead to me because of ".
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#7free software movement => FSF in the minds of most HNers. I cannot in good conscience vote this up, unless the title is changed.
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#8Sorry guys! I wasn't aware of the other use of the term - I've changed the title!
What are your thoughts on the post?
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#9It's not necessarily a bad idea to charge money starting with the first customer. But if you have a network-oriented product, it won't get critical mass.
"The problem is, just about every startup is following this mantra [of free software], and that's exactly the reason why a lot of them fail."
Whereas, if startups just locked down their product, most of them would start to succeed? What are some examples where having a free version actually killed a project?