I am interested in knowing if anyone has any book recommendations regarding making money with open source.
Generating Income from Open Source
111–120 of 126 posts
Re: Generating Income from Open Source
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Source available" is not open source and has nothing to do with open source. Open source never confused people until bad-faith actors started intentionally trying to confuse them by labeling things that aren't open source as "open source". Open source has a precise definition and it has had it for decades . If you describe your software as open source and it is not available under an open source license then you are…
> Guess what, most people can't make money from their hobbies Essentially this. As talking heads said, Never for money Always for love
I have a dozen hobbies and have been able to make money out of every single one I've actually tried to. Be it as a coach/tutor, organizing events, creating things, etc.
My girlfriend wanted to turn her life-long artistic craft (ceramics) into proper work so we opened an art studio together.
It's not hard, problem's with you, and problem is certainly with anyone arguing that you can't make money with open source. Just because you don't know how doesn't mean it's not possible.
Living off your hobbies makes for a good life.
Re: Generating Income from Open Source
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many OSS companies. I think what the OP is (correctly) complaining about is people writing OSS and then getting upset when others sell it, or sell things based on it. I see this attitude creeping into e.g. articles on The Register. If you want to licence your software so anyone can use or resell it, don't be surprised when they do.
It sounds like OP is getting upset when people write OSS and then relicense it in such a way to restrict unfettered usage to provide or maintain a revenue stream. E.g. Elastic search vs. Amazon (elastic search does run upon the Linux kernel after all)
This criticism only applies to the economic rents being extracted aka charging too much and not giving the economic rents to the producer of the economic rent. If you build a product and charge based on the incremental value you provide, there is hardly reason for criticism.
Re: Generating Income from Open Source
#114[old person rant] There is nothing wrong with developing software and selling it. It used to be the norm and it is still quite common. These days "open source" is virtue signaling and expected "to be cool". That people then grump about not being paid shows that they are not particularly interested in the concept of open source. However, the term open source has been used for so many different things that is has lost…
I wonder if "pay to compile" would work well. In other words, open source your code to the world, but if you want to download an .exe you need to pay an upfront cost. Obviously doesn't work with all types of software, but even something like a C++ backend library (like OpenCV) you could open source the C++, but sell access to the python bindings.
The problem is licensing fees.
The fee itself may be insignificant
but you need to track who has to pay who and this requires license keys and licensing servers and all the logistics to get these things to the right places.
Re: Generating Income from Open Source
#115I recently ran across the the license for Dragonfly [1] which has some restrictions (rights reserved), but 5 years after the license date the license switches to Apache 2.0. Basically a time-limited rights reservation. I don't hate it. I might even contribute to such a project for free. I propose something like this: When I release code, it's rights-reserved for 5 years, then open-source (and this particular clause w…
That license is the Business Source License, created for MariaDB I believe: => https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/ MariaDB - Adopting and Developing BSL Software I've also noticed Sentry using it. I think it address one of the the main criticisms of proprietary licenses, while still allowing a company to form a considerable moat around their software. (I think we can agree, death of author + 70 years is way too lon…
When I see people argue about government intervention, I always think that if the intervention is going against the wishes of people, there will be a private sector attempt to undo or reverse the government intervention but equilibrium isn't guaranteed.
Too long copyright durations and too stringent distribution restrictions are undone by open source projects. This does not result in an equilibrium because there is a vast space of projects that need to be proprietary in some dimension and open source in another. The equilibrium solution has to be a hybrid of the two approaches.
Side none: An equilibrium is like a limit of a converging series. You don't have to reach it, just get close enough until you are happy aka |x_i - x|< epsilon
Re: Generating Income from Open Source
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isotope's actual license page is much clearer than the article's summary: > The open source license is designed for you to use Isotope to build open source and personal projects. The Isotope open source license is GPLv3. The GPLv3 has many terms, but the most important is how it is sticky when you distribute your work publicly. From the GPL FAQ: >> If you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GP…
Thank you for the correction; I'm not familiar with the project and just went off how the article described it. > Although the page says that the project's use of GPLv3 is "designed for you to use Isotope to build open source and personal projects", it does not say that Isotope cannot be used for commercial projects under GPLv3. Yeah, it's unfortunate they misrepresented the GPL and I wonder if that is how the author…
They haven't misrepresented anything. The GPL license can be used for open source projects by companies (e.g. for commercial purposes). There is no need to include a more specific category if you already covered the broader category.
Re: Generating Income from Open Source
#117If the license restricts you to personal use only, it is not an open source license .
Good thing the license allows personal use rather restricting only to personal use.
People don't understand that in these constellations the project is commercially released first and then the open source license allows things that have not been covered by the commercial license. This is the opposite of restriction.
Re: Generating Income from Open Source
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Source available" is not open source and has nothing to do with open source. Open source never confused people until bad-faith actors started intentionally trying to confuse them by labeling things that aren't open source as "open source". Open source has a precise definition and it has had it for decades . If you describe your software as open source and it is not available under an open source license then you are…
> "Source available" is not open source and has nothing to do with open source. Open source never confused people until bad-faith actors started intentionally trying to confuse them by labeling things that aren't open source as "open source". I do not know how one can say such a thing with a straight face. The confusion does not require bad faith actors, but just the ability to speak English. LITERACY is what causes…
Open source isn't a literal term. It doesn't mean "the source is open". That isn't how the English language works. It is a compound term with its own meaning just like any other.
Re: Generating Income from Open Source
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I talk to businesses, individuals, and enterprises every single day and they all refer to my SAS as open source software. I know it gets tedious, but its useful to politely correct this terminology when it's used incorrectly. I get that managers are not techies, but allowing them to use this term is harmful to them. A) they heard the term from one of their programmers, which means the programmer doesn't understand…
> I get that managers are not techies, but allowing them to use this term is harmful to them. All I'm saying is that if the words you use have a reasonable interpretation that is different from what is intended, it is better to just adopt new phrasing. > which can lead to legal troubles I very much doubt this. LeCun has been calling MAIR's work Open Source for quite awhile and people have been arguing about it being…
>Fwiw, I don't know a single person, in the flesh, that thinks Open Source is different from Source Available.
Then educate them. Open source has had a stable definition since before I was born. It is not up for debate. All of a sudden in the last couple of years shitty people have tried to confuse people by labelling non-free licenses 'open source'. That is fraudulent.
Re: Generating Income from Open Source
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only place I've ever seen anyone pretend that "open source" can legitimately mean something other than the OSI's definition is on this forum. I don’t think this is entirely accurate in practice. I talk to businesses, individuals, and enterprises every single day and they all refer to my SAS as open source software. So I don’t think everybody sees OSS like you and OSI wills them to. I’m stepping on toes by sayin…
>The only places I’ve seen this dogma is here on HN, in GitHub issues about gaslighting [^0], and on r/opensource. Part of the problem is the "Open Software Foundation" likes to take a bunch of corporate money and then pen definitions of what "really is" and "really isn't" open source that people pick up on.
They established the definition and nobody had a problem with it for decades. It has nothing to do with money.