A lot of people don’t know absolutely massive amount of functionality that is stuffed in to Mathematica. It does everything from symbolic math to astronomy to economics to deep learning to biology to ... If Wolfram had figured out how to make his software free while still having sustained business, he would undoubtedly be the hero of the tech/nerd/geek world, perhaps shoulder to shoulder with Jobs or Linus or Gates -…
It was free with every NeXT workstation! This right here, I believe, is the biggest problem facing software today. How do you pay for it? End-users expect software to cost $0, yet it takes a lot of time and effort to build anything. The most successful software projects and companies I see today are those which figured out innovative business models: advertising, hardware, free for open source / paid for business, ma…
You find the people who are making money with it, find conveniences that those people would appreciate, and put them behind a paywall.
Or, with the same group of people, offer them a support contract. Sell them the “premium” version of the software with 24-7 support and contractors who can solve any problem they might come across.
Or, host the software as a service and let people pay for that.
Or, host the software as a feee service and use your users’ data to market products at them.
Or, use the software to solve a social or governmental problem, apply for grants to do more of that, and use some of the grant money to improve the software.
Or you can always sell virtual hats.
There are lots of ways to do it.