Even Stallman doesn't have anything against paying for software. Seth's point 1 is reasonable. Point 2 is about paying for support, not paying for the software itself. Point 3 is no point at all, it's just rephrasing point 1 (ie marketing is about the business, not the software).
On paying for software
21–30 of 279 posts
Re: On paying for software
#22Most of the “software” mentioned in the post, are actually services (slack, zoom, tidal, etc). For many people, it is easier to accept to pay for a service rather than software. While I do use paid services, I usually “pay” (donate) for free and open source software. Why? It helps me get my work done, support is usually good, I set the price and I know that people who aren't as fortunate as I (being able to afford to…
The marginal cost for software is zero, the marginal cost for services is non-zero. This puts a floor under the price. People don't accept that they have to pay, rather they are given no choice.
Right, mentioning Keynote and services like Dropbox (as done in the article) in the same way isn't quite right. Yes the marginal cost for another user on Keynote is zero but certainly not Dropbox or any other software as a service. If 2 people use Dropbox is may cost almost nothing but if thousands use it you either need a business model because costs could be significant or (like some of the big players) have another business group that subsidizes the running cost.
Re: On paying for software
#23Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Are the available options stacked against them? Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients using open source software. But what if you don't want to be a consultant and simply want to charge a business for using your open source product? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can…
As someone that was part of an effort to do this in the early .com days, it is a lost hope trying to sell open source software to consumers. While selling to enterprise can be made via consulting and training, most consumers just want a one time shot paying for their software. Well, if you do that with commercial software, usually the only way to avoid paying is piracy. In open source world, they can just go to anoth…
Yes, I agree with what you say.
I actually think the dual-licencing model seems the most realistic for many developers who are selling to a business. Ironically, it's because a strong copyleft licence like the GPL is unattractive to many businesses that they naturally turn to the commercial licence which allows them to make changes they don't need to release publicly.
I'm sympathetic to what Fair Source is trying to do, but even that garnered a lot of negative reaction among developers (at least if you read the discussion on Hacker News).
Re: On paying for software
#24Most of the “software” mentioned in the post, are actually services (slack, zoom, tidal, etc). For many people, it is easier to accept to pay for a service rather than software. While I do use paid services, I usually “pay” (donate) for free and open source software. Why? It helps me get my work done, support is usually good, I set the price and I know that people who aren't as fortunate as I (being able to afford to…
The marginal cost for software is zero, the marginal cost for services is non-zero. This puts a floor under the price. People don't accept that they have to pay, rather they are given no choice.
Often.. but for a lot of software businesses, the difference between being software or software as service is a choice, and cost is often a minor implication of the choice.
Re: On paying for software
#25I have experience selling to companies and I’ve found that even when they realise they need and want to pay for a piece of software they have absolutely no clue how to figure out what it’s worth. Consequently they engage in endless hardball negotiation and invite other suppliers to provide quotes (even when your offering uniquely meets all requirements). In the end the challenge is to get customers comfortable that t…
This is a great point.
No one wants to be ripped off. Software basically can't be objectively priced. You might be selling £50k per seat software that competes with £50, or free. It sucks to be making that decision.
Re: On paying for software
#26I think I have never read a piece in which the word "single-minded" is used in a positive way. Mostly people refer to it as a bad thing. Also I don't think that single-mindness really helps developing good software people want to use. Because you already have to think about two things here.
Re: On paying for software
#27As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/
Love the link. It is easier to find people willing to pay for software when focusing on Apple and Microsoft platforms. How has been your experience regarding consumers per platform?
Thanks! :-) Apple users are more willing to pay in my experience.
Re: On paying for software
#28As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/
I can understand how you feel and I also think your blog post is correct in many ways.
However I think software should be reasonably priced which is most often not the case.
And also people can't pay everybody 5-10 dollar/euro for everything, we would quickly need to pay thousands of dollars/euros yearly to access/use everything. That's why I think sometimes having another way of "paying", like through ads or maybe some kind of crowdsourced project is a good alternative for some things.
Re: On paying for software
#29Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Are the available options stacked against them? Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients using open source software. But what if you don't want to be a consultant and simply want to charge a business for using your open source product? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can…
With regards to WordPress, it’s the lack of policing on the OSS-ness of a plug-in — as you mention — helps create a viable market, but many of the most successful plugin devs sell a premium version tied to a service in some way. Whether the service is necessary is often beside the point, the SaaS aspect can be used as a shield to obfuscate the open source code.
I also think with WordPress in particular, the target customer doesn’t know how to compile the plugin source if they find it. It’s easier to pay than to figure out how to get it for free. Now, whole rings of people sharing premium themes and plugins exist, but the malware often added to those items can turn people off of that method. It’s easier to just buy it.
Honestly, support seems to be the most long lasting option — see RHEL and Canonical and Oracle with their Linux distros. You can use centos instead of RHEL (and could before red hat took it over, for that matter), but you’d need to deal with the the problems yourself or have a person on staff to deal with them. Especially as stuff is more cloud-based,it’s easier to just have a support contract.
The problem with this model for the indie developer, of course, is that the act of offering support has a cost too. Time, extra staff, logistics — and that can be harder to do than the closed-source perpetual license model, where you offer support but it’s understood the transaction is primarily for the software. And just speaking for myself, if I buy a piece of software, I’m not necessarily going to bug the dev every time something breaks b/c I was really buying the ability that use the software that would otherwise not be available to me. But if I am explicitly paying for support, I’m going to be more entitled, even if it’s for an OSS product. Because if I don’t get support and it’s OSS, why didn’t I just compile it myself and save money?
Re: On paying for software
#30As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/
Great blog post - thanks for writing it. I've had the same experience with people asking for an MIT license on dependabot-core (the public repo that holds the core logic for my SaaS business, but which has no license and a comment saying those who wish to use it for commercial gain should contact me instead). I already give the product away for free to open source projects and anyone using it in a personal capacity, but for a small number of people that's not enough.
Free software is a wonderful thing - it's fantastic that our community shares its work so widely and generously. It is not, however, the only, or the best, model for creating innovation at all times. I'm able to work full time on Dependabot because by providing it as SaaS I can pay myself a wage and by owning the codebase I can protect myself from a larger player copying my work. There's no doubt in my mind that enabling me to work on the product full time is a better outcome for the world than a license that would let others distribute and profit from it.