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You sell additional premium extension to provide needed left out of the open-source offering.
You sell cloud hosting and on prem hosting.
There is nothing at all wrong with that. That you have built a business where you make a living from software you wrote is awesome. I wish I could.
I don't get this part:
> In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It's called open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's fully remote managed and monitored by me more steady income, yay
When people object to cloud (SaaS really), I tend to think it's about what you could variously describe as ownership, control, privacy, and security. They want to be the only ones who can access their data. They want updates to happen on their schedule. If you want the developer to manage and monitor your installation, why not use a hosted version?
Another reason is bandwidth, but I wouldn't expect that to be a significant consideration for invoicing software.
Potential next episode: someone is taking advantage of my open source software, it's getting harder to sell it and earn a living.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". So you've made the assumption that it's distributed under a source access only license, but instead of verifying that assumption, you're asking others to correct the conclusions you draw from it.
To paraphrase Cunningham's Law: Posting the wrong answer is the best way to get the right answer.
"What do you do?" "Software development." "What kind of software?" [back and forth, question-and-short-answer at a time]
"What do you do?" "Software development." "Oh, so you like write websites and stuff?" "No, actually, [long enthusiastic explanation of their job]"
Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses ) P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.
Even though OSI clearly defines what "open source" means, it is sometimes (often even?) used as a synonym for "source available", as opposed to "free software" (which is the term that FSF promotes). I'm not saying which term is better, just explaining why "open source" might not be objectively wrong in this case.
They define what they think it clearly means to them... but they don't own the term.
If it's AGPL it's free software, not open source
Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses ) P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.
Technically, you could provide binaries and a GPL license, then provide source code when verified customers (eg they send their receipt/license number with their request) ask for it.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing in GPL that says you can't sell the software and operate this way. If your customers hand out the binaries to third parties, that's on them to provide the GPL and source code, not you. And of course, they could sell, re-release, etc, but anyone else could come and do the same to them.
It's risky, to be sure, and it feels "wrong" only because we've become conditioned to the status quo of so-called "intellectual property". Frankly, I would love if I could write open source software for a living, but there's a big fear of letting go of a steady paycheck (and benefits!), but that has more to do with entrepreneurship fears than software licenses.
No. You sell additional premium extension to provide needed left out of the open-source offering. You sell cloud hosting and on prem hosting. There is nothing at all wrong with that. That you have built a business where you make a living from software you wrote is awesome. I wish I could.
Kudos to the author! I don't get this part: > In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It's called open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's fully remote managed and monitored by me more steady income, yay When people object to cloud (SaaS really), I tend to think…