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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

#41

Post by est31 »

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 :)

You have a point. I've added " around it.

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

#42

Post by krupan »

cwyers wrote: post #17
tacostakohashi wrote: post #11

I wonder what would happen if someone started an open source software "vendor" run along the lines of public radio / podcasts. Open source licensed (using a regular GPL or other license, nothing new or tricky), but a prominent encouragement to donate it you find it useful. Those donations could then be used to hire full-time developers, and work on the kinds of software that is currently not well served by open-sourc…

Depends on your market. If it's direct to consumer, you're basically in the same boat as shareware/freeware back in the day, and it's a model that _can_ work. If your market is businesses, then no. There is no budget for donations at most businesses. There is a budget for _buying_ things.

This. This is exactly how Red Hat makes money with open source. They straight up sell it to businesses.

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

#43

Post by Kye »

ckuhl wrote: post #22
tacostakohashi wrote: post #11

I wonder what would happen if someone started an open source software "vendor" run along the lines of public radio / podcasts. Open source licensed (using a regular GPL or other license, nothing new or tricky), but a prominent encouragement to donate it you find it useful. Those donations could then be used to hire full-time developers, and work on the kinds of software that is currently not well served by open-sourc…

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.

Mastodon has a sponsor list on joinmastodon.org that works like this.

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

#45

Post by sanxiyn »

adamnemecek wrote: post #40
sanxiyn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am working on Rust to JS compiler based on Scala.js design. I plan to release it using Street Performer Protocol.

You are doing God's work. Is it on github?

Street Performer Protocol means the source won't be released until the fund is raised. (It's work-in-progress, so I am not fundraising yet. It will probably be on Kickstarter with a demo to prove the thing is real.)

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

#46

Post by adamnemecek »

sanxiyn wrote: post #45
adamnemecek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are doing God's work. Is it on github?

Street Performer Protocol means the source won't be released until the fund is raised. (It's work-in-progress, so I am not fundraising yet. It will probably be on Kickstarter with a demo to prove the thing is real.)

Are you doing this fulltime?

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

#47

Post by hodgesrm »

rburhum wrote: post #25

I think doing the argument of "open source vs business focused" is incorrect. I would just make the comparison of "business focused vs not business focused". If it is open source or not, that is just a detail of the business strategy. One of the main problem that we technologist fail at is that a lot of the times we assume technology == product. When we do this, we completely overlook all the necessary infrastructure…

I was going to write this comment but you did it already. ;)

Another common criticism of OSS goes along the lines of "it does not monetize value fully." In other words it creates value but the authors don't collect on it completely.

However, the same statement is true of proprietary software. Anybody who has sold proprietary products knows that what you recover is a fraction of the cost of your users doing it themselves. It might be a bigger fraction than OSS but not always--maybe you don't even get the sale in the first place because users are afraid of lock-in.

It's therefore quite misleading to think in terms of different economic models for OSS and proprietary-based businesses. There are more points in common than differences.

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

#48

Post by sanxiyn »

adamnemecek wrote: post #46
sanxiyn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Street Performer Protocol means the source won't be released until the fund is raised. (It's work-in-progress, so I am not fundraising yet. It will probably be on Kickstarter with a demo to prove the thing is real.)

Are you doing this fulltime?

Yes. 3 months in.

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

#49

Post by snaky »

est31 wrote: post #16
tacostakohashi wrote: post #11

I wonder what would happen if someone started an open source software "vendor" run along the lines of public radio / podcasts. Open source licensed (using a regular GPL or other license, nothing new or tricky), but a prominent encouragement to donate it you find it useful. Those donations could then be used to hire full-time developers, and work on the kinds of software that is currently not well served by open-sourc…

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

Chinese livestreaming industry is based on donations, so-called 'virtual gifts', and top streamers can make $100,000 a month or more.

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

#50

Post by krupan »

It feels to me like there was a lot of social pressure over the last 10 years or so for open source projects to use the most permissive open source license they could. You were cool and "more free" if you used Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses. I wonder if this is coming back to bite us now. Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software. Would things be different for the companies we've been talking about lately (mongo, redis, elastisearch, etc.) if they had gone with a GPL license and a Red Hat-like business model from the start?
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