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Generating Income from Open Source

vadimdemedes.com

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Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#81

Post by ezekg »

bruce511 wrote: post #24
ezekg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only place I've ever seen anyone pretend that "open source" can legitimately mean something other than the OSI's definition is on this forum. I don’t think this is entirely accurate in practice. I talk to businesses, individuals, and enterprises every single day and they all refer to my SAS as open source software. So I don’t think everybody sees OSS like you and OSI wills them to. I’m stepping on toes by sayin…

>> I talk to businesses, individuals, and enterprises every single day and they all refer to my SAS as open source software. I know it gets tedious, but its useful to politely correct this terminology when it's used incorrectly. I get that managers are not techies, but allowing them to use this term is harmful to them. A) they heard the term from one of their programmers, which means the programmer doesn't understand…

The problem is that I'm not talking to managers when seeing the term open source, most of the time I'm talking to programmers. Literally all techies.

Many of them can use, modify, and distribute my SAS free of charge, like every other OSS license they know, so it actually won't get them into legal trouble. My SAS is open source to them, because the ELv2 only has a single usage restriction and that's not their use-case. For most, it's more permissive than GPL/AGPL!

I'm not going to correct them.

Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#82

Post by noirscape »

tm-guimaraes wrote: post #48
ThinkBeat wrote: post #42

[old person rant] There is nothing wrong with developing software and selling it. It used to be the norm and it is still quite common. These days "open source" is virtue signaling and expected "to be cool". That people then grump about not being paid shows that they are not particularly interested in the concept of open source. However, the term open source has been used for so many different things that is has lost…

Sourcehut seems to be an exception here, Drew not only has a profitable open source business, he not only contributes upstream, but also donate to open source projects.

Sourcehut is a bit of an oddball though - it's mostly profitable because it's not a free service. As in, if you want to host your product at sourcehut, Drew expects (but doesn't force) you to pay for it[0]. Contributing is free though.

Also helping sourcehut is that it's actual deployment process is uh... Interesting? It's expecting to run on Alpine (and not dockerized Alpine) and you need to be able to supply an email server. The latter especially means that the usual problem of "FOSS hosting with a price label" doesn't really pop up; nobody is going to bother cloning sourcehuts deployment setup without the fees attached because very few people want to selfhost email for a personal instance of FOSS software. (Since self-hosting email is rather annoying for maintenance since your server IP can end up in random blacklists and you won't know until the setup stops working, and sourcehut relies a lot on email.)

[0]: https://man.sr.ht/billing-faq.md - seems to mostly be on a "were not gonna be jerks about it" - "if you're so poor you can't pay for sourcehut on the price given, send me an email and we'll work something out" basis - the goal doesn't seem to be to extract profit from every user and "fuck poor people", which is quite respectable if you ask me.

Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#83

Post by ozim »

hutzlibu wrote: post #77
zrail wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A beautiful thing about the world is that you don't have to care at all what the FSF have opinions on if you don't want to. The license you choose to provide to your users is between you and them.

Yes, but please don't call it open source then, if it isn't open in the way, that people expect.

From what I understand from reading this thread - that is the whole point of “nothing wrong with making and selling software” - it does not and most likely should not be open source or called open source. Where only reasons for slapping open source on project is free marketing and “being cool”.

Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#84

Post by ghaff »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #42

[old person rant] There is nothing wrong with developing software and selling it. It used to be the norm and it is still quite common. These days "open source" is virtue signaling and expected "to be cool". That people then grump about not being paid shows that they are not particularly interested in the concept of open source. However, the term open source has been used for so many different things that is has lost…

Based on consulting calls I've had with companies, a very common pattern is:

- They want to be "open source" because they or their VC think it's important for the marketing benefits and it seems to be of interest to customers

- But, they're not really planning to invest to make the open source development model work

- And, they sure don't want to disadvantage themselves from a business perspective (have trouble holding features back/give potential competitors a leg up)

Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#85

Post by SoftTalker »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #44

While we're here, does anyone know if a sole proprietorship donating to OS projects for "sponsorship" (aka listing the donor company's name in the project's github) is deductible as Advertising expenses? Specifically wondering about Canada personally, but I'm sure people in the U.S. would benefit from this knowledge as well. Our tax law (in Canada) is so opaque, and I feel like finding ways for these monetary contrib…

Talk to an accountant. As I understand it, in the USA, "donations" are not deductible unless they are to a bona-fide charity/501(c)(3) type of organiztion.

To be deductible as advertising, I would think the payment would need to be be explicitly for advertising services, not a dontation with the side-effect that you are recognized and thanked on a list of donors. That's just a courtesy, not an advertisement.

Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#86

Post by rerdavies »

kiba wrote: post #25
ezekg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Words mean what people use them as. I don't care what OSI says, OSS and SAS are the same thing. I completely agree. I’ve avoided using the term “open source” where possible for my SAS, instead opting for word-play like “open, source-available”, but it was frustrating that I felt I even needed to do that to avoid backlash from the zealots. And I’ve loosened my reigns there a bit as well as time has gone by. I think…

It's very confusing when someone said it's open source when it isn't actually open source. I quite literally grew up with the specific definition. If people decided to redefine open source software, then I'll need a new specific definition, because it's no longer useful or fit for the purpose.

Not sure that the definition was fit for purpose in the first place. A perfectly reasonable understanding of Open Source is that the source is open (whether conditions are attached or not).

And if you then object to conditions being attached to how you use it, perhaps you should also consider the onerous conditions imposed by the GPL license.

Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#87

Post by alphazard »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #42

[old person rant] There is nothing wrong with developing software and selling it. It used to be the norm and it is still quite common. These days "open source" is virtue signaling and expected "to be cool". That people then grump about not being paid shows that they are not particularly interested in the concept of open source. However, the term open source has been used for so many different things that is has lost…

B2C software increasingly needs to be at least source-available to prove security. It's hard to take a password manager or file storage product seriously if the client code isn't available for audit.

Say what you want about copyright, just revealing the source impedes your ability to commercialize it.

That means the client code can't be your secret sauce. The client code is effectively this table-stakes item that you have to release for free. The hosted server component is where you have to put your differentiators.

Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#88

Post by brightlancer »

commoner wrote: post #39
brightlancer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not "virtually closed source" to license something as GPLv3 and also under a proprietary license. That is not what is proposed in the article: ---- Isotope is open source, but there are different licenses depending on how you intend to use it: Open source license. This license allows Isotope to be used in personal or open source projects for free. Commercial license. This license permits you to use Isotope in…

Isotope's actual license page is much clearer than the article's summary: > The open source license is designed for you to use Isotope to build open source and personal projects. The Isotope open source license is GPLv3. The GPLv3 has many terms, but the most important is how it is sticky when you distribute your work publicly. From the GPL FAQ: >> If you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GP…

Thank you for the correction; I'm not familiar with the project and just went off how the article described it.

> Although the page says that the project's use of GPLv3 is "designed for you to use Isotope to build open source and personal projects", it does not say that Isotope cannot be used for commercial projects under GPLv3.

Yeah, it's unfortunate they misrepresented the GPL and I wonder if that is how the author became confused.

Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#89

Post by brightlancer »

robertlagrant wrote: post #58
brightlancer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not "virtually closed source" to license something as GPLv3 and also under a proprietary license. That is not what is proposed in the article: ---- Isotope is open source, but there are different licenses depending on how you intend to use it: Open source license. This license allows Isotope to be used in personal or open source projects for free. Commercial license. This license permits you to use Isotope in…

> That is not open source. It's proprietary software offered as freeware for non-commercial use I shudder at these confident, definitive statements when they're off the mark this far. It's not just "freeware" when you can see, modify, sell and redistribute under the same licence. It's open source.

> It's not just "freeware" when you can see, modify, sell and redistribute under the same licence. It's open source.

As the author described it, you could _not_ sell it:

"This license allows Isotope to be used in personal or open source projects for free."

It turns out that the author was incorrect about Isotope because their software is GPL, but what they were proposing was not open source:

"There are no Pro versions, no license keys and there’s nothing else to maintain. Individual developers enjoy the same tool for free, while companies pay a reasonable price."

Re: Generating Income from Open Source

#90

Post by pessimizer »

phkahler wrote: post #67
ThinkBeat wrote: post #42

[old person rant] There is nothing wrong with developing software and selling it. It used to be the norm and it is still quite common. These days "open source" is virtue signaling and expected "to be cool". That people then grump about not being paid shows that they are not particularly interested in the concept of open source. However, the term open source has been used for so many different things that is has lost…

>> There are some core and vital open-source projects that have enormous importance for millions. I think supporting them should be a priority. I'm going out on a limb here, but what have you done to support them? Apologies if you have, but a lot of people seem to want someone else to support their favorite free thing.

They're far more likely to have donated than the millions that depend on the software, because this is another developer, so more likely to be empathetic because developers know how unrewarding and important FOSS development can be. That's not a solution, that's the status quo.

Also, it's not helpful to go out of your way this much to disqualify someone from having an opinion. It's essentially an accusation of hypocrisy, made absolutely blindly and randomly at a person you don't know anything about who expressed an opinion you didn't like.

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