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How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

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Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#81

Post by varispeed »

protomyth wrote: post #6

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 This would be an interesting model for quite a few services. It reminds me of Ubiquity's cloud key. I wish some government grant…

I wonder if you still need to go through expensive UL and other testing before being able to market such product? The RPi has an integrator programme, but still there are potentially large fees to pay which makes whole thing not so attractive unless you are going to wing it and hope nobody will check.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#82

Post by jjice »

yboris wrote: post #49

I sell my MIT open source Video Hub App for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it's charityware). Over the 3 years it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria. Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/ GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...

I was actually looking for something just like this since I won't have access to my Jellyfin server for a while. This looks perfect.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#83

Post by gregmac »

koonsolo wrote: post #60

I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or how many customers would refuse to buy it when it's not open source. Asking this because sometimes I also wonder if I should open source my project, but I have my doubts on how much you can gain from it (apart from the nice feeling of contributing to open source ;))

> I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or how many customers would refuse to buy it when it's not open source.

Contributors is easy to judge, but the second bit is not. It includes people you'll never even hear from.

For me, the big question I ask is basically "What are the chances this software becomes unavailable in the future and what's my escape plan?" These two weigh against each other -- if it's a non-critical tool and the plan is "go back to doing it the old way, with near zero business impact" then I don't really care about the chances it disappears a whole lot. If it's "Start a several-months migration effort while the business is crippled" then suddenly that first bit becomes incredibly important.

I consider chances a small (especially one-person) company disappears is fairly high. Same for a VC-funded startup (along with the chances they kill or pivot away from the product, which is effectively the same thing).

Open source means it never really becomes "unavailable": It might be costly (eg if I have to fund maintenance on my own) but it still provides low risk of crippling my business.

When I'm considering new software, the non-OSS stuff run by small companies just naturally goes to the bottom of the list for exactly this reason. If I go with something higher up on that list, that company won't even know they were being considered, let alone why I didn't pick them.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#84

Post by bityard »

leovailati wrote: post #63
kgwgk wrote: post #44

Potential next episode: someone is taking advantage of my open source software, it's getting harder to sell it and earn a living.

Just wondering here, is there any way to protect oneself from that type of situation while at the same time keeping the source code open? Obviously, the name and logo are trademarked, but a third party could rebrand the program while using the same underlying source code.

Yes, it's called the GPL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

Under the GPL, a competitor can certainly take the code, rebrand it, and sell it as their own but they are required to provide the full source code of whatever "borrowed" GPL code they distribute to the end user. This ensures that the source (and whatever changes/additions are made) cannot be taken and locked up by someone else, which is possible with more permissive licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#86

Post by renewiltord »

yakubin wrote: post #32
prepend wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I’m contradicting the author without validating my claim. And it’s super easy to validate my claim, but I just didn’t. When confronted, I complain that it takes greater than 10 seconds to verify my claim.” This is curious behavior. There’s lots of incorrect and misleading articles. But I try to bring up questions only when exhausting reasonable investigations.

1. There is no link in the article to the zip file. 2. Searching for open3A in duckduckgo brings me to a page that spits out PHP errors and doesn't give me anything. 3. The only way that I now know where the zip file is, is because another commenter linked to it. 4. We've seen companies disguise something as open-source, when it wasn't. 5. Open source is commonly hard-to-sell. So no, it wasn't 10 seconds to verify an…

Fascinating. I consider myself to have reasonable mastery of my tools and I usually pick good tools for my purposes.

Here's a re-enactment of how I detected the license: https://i.imgur.com/Gr4xMT5.mp4

It's near trivially easy.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#87

Post by dwohnitmok »

unnouinceput wrote: post #74
leovailati wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering here, is there any way to protect oneself from that type of situation while at the same time keeping the source code open? Obviously, the name and logo are trademarked, but a third party could rebrand the program while using the same underlying source code.

Open source == no protection. You rely on the morals of your customers. At any time somebody bigger than you can take your free source, modify it, make it better because they have already a base and sell it as closed proprietary software and you can't do anything about it.

> sell it as closed proprietary software

This is not true for all open source licenses. Copyleft licenses such as the GPL and its variants prevent this.

Someone can distribute your software instead of you and thereby lock you out of any profits there, especially if they undercut your price (in the limit case they can distribute your paid software for free), but certain open source licenses prevent retroactive locking as proprietary software.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#88

Post by atleta »

protomyth wrote: post #6

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 This would be an interesting model for quite a few services. It reminds me of Ubiquity's cloud key. I wish some government grant…

This has been a usual business model for larger vendors (and servers): selling appliances. Google also did it (I think it was for intranet search), it was also one of the story threads in the Silicon Valley sitcom (see "the box").

When I launched my first startup, I also did something similar. Though we were selling a service: we'd deliver it as a 'box' (my co-founder actually called it 'the box' - before SV was aired :) ). It was in 2011, and we didn't have the RasPi back then so we used something called the SheevaPlug [1] . It didn't have a display port, which we'd needed later on, but it was great for plug'n'play'n'forget installation. (Actually one of these is still running at one of our first customers, even though the backing service has been shut down ~5 years ago. Probably nobody knows any more what it's doing and they just think 'better not touch'.)

It's the easiest and most logical way to deliver some of the software/services. It mostly depends on whether it's something you want to interact with on your own machine (and a single machine) or whether you want to have it always running and/or multiple people to access it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#89

Post by dv_dt »

mosaic_school wrote: post #7

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.

Though most open source licensed projects allow anyone to come along and access the source, the strict interpretation of the GPL for instance, is that those rights are only extended to customers/users of the software. Those customers are perfectly within their rights to distribute it openly in turn - but as I understand it, neither the the copywrite holder(s) of the source nor the providers transmitting a GPL project to an end user are obligated to provide a copy to any person who asks. Only that particular user who was provided the binary.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#90

Post by mraza007 »

yboris wrote: post #49

I sell my MIT open source Video Hub App for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it's charityware). Over the 3 years it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria. Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/ GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...

Pretty cool product. I have a very similar product but my question is that how did you convinced the users to pay for the product if its already free
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