I work for a company whose products are used by +90% of Fortune 500 companies; the base of those products is Xen and other free software built to complement it. The company recognizes most of the...
I work for a company whose products are used by +90% of Fortune 500 companies; the base of those products is Xen and other free software built to complement it.
The company recognizes most of the business depends on free software and as such there is a lot of investment to keep it competitive Still, it's not what gets sold to the customer, what gets sold to customers are services. If the software does not support services that can be sold it's not going to get investment by a company, long-term.
Unless there is better support for developer to be able to sell services the situation he describes won't change and there will still there be need for a middleman to act between software engineers and customers giving money.
Alternatively people can try going the patronage / route,but that still needs good communications with people to get noted.
I think service and support are the best ways to monetize free and open source software. Radium, Ardour, and Zyn-Fusion all charge for compiled versions of their software for Windows, MacOS and...
I think service and support are the best ways to monetize free and open source software. Radium, Ardour, and Zyn-Fusion all charge for compiled versions of their software for Windows, MacOS and Linux, even though, at least on the former two, it is fairly trivial to build them (Ardour is already a package in most major Linux distros, I use Linux to avoid building in Windows). I also happen to have Radium and Zyn-Fusion compiled on my Arch install (I use the provided binaries if I'm in Windows or Debian), but this actually behaves closer to the traditional software model.
Something Kjetil Matheussen (the Radium dev) does, that I think is great, is tiered support. If you pay $5/10/20 per month, or $20/40/60 per year (I think), you are on a different support tier, meaning your bugs and feature requests will get priority based on how much you pay, similar to any subscription service. You can be a free user and submit a request, and while he'll get to it a bit later, he won't ignore it (he's quick, and incoming traffic on his bug tracker is slow). Ardour and Zyn-Fusion (at least after fully open-sourcing the source code after the promised deadline) use the same support channels for free or paid users, no priority, but you pay for the convenience of pre-compiled software.
I think it's just up to developers to be creative in how they seek compensation. Moderately high one-time payments (Zyn-Fusion) or lower-price subscription tiers (Ardour and Radium) provide excellent ways to generate income for free software projects without having to advertise or nag your users to pay you back, while respecting their freedoms with the software.
I work for a company whose products are used by +90% of Fortune 500 companies; the base of those products is Xen and other free software built to complement it.
The company recognizes most of the business depends on free software and as such there is a lot of investment to keep it competitive Still, it's not what gets sold to the customer, what gets sold to customers are services. If the software does not support services that can be sold it's not going to get investment by a company, long-term.
Unless there is better support for developer to be able to sell services the situation he describes won't change and there will still there be need for a middleman to act between software engineers and customers giving money.
Alternatively people can try going the patronage / route,but that still needs good communications with people to get noted.
The HN post on this that the author linked at the bottom is a pretty good read too, IMO:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19431444
I think service and support are the best ways to monetize free and open source software. Radium, Ardour, and Zyn-Fusion all charge for compiled versions of their software for Windows, MacOS and Linux, even though, at least on the former two, it is fairly trivial to build them (Ardour is already a package in most major Linux distros, I use Linux to avoid building in Windows). I also happen to have Radium and Zyn-Fusion compiled on my Arch install (I use the provided binaries if I'm in Windows or Debian), but this actually behaves closer to the traditional software model.
Something Kjetil Matheussen (the Radium dev) does, that I think is great, is tiered support. If you pay $5/10/20 per month, or $20/40/60 per year (I think), you are on a different support tier, meaning your bugs and feature requests will get priority based on how much you pay, similar to any subscription service. You can be a free user and submit a request, and while he'll get to it a bit later, he won't ignore it (he's quick, and incoming traffic on his bug tracker is slow). Ardour and Zyn-Fusion (at least after fully open-sourcing the source code after the promised deadline) use the same support channels for free or paid users, no priority, but you pay for the convenience of pre-compiled software.
I think it's just up to developers to be creative in how they seek compensation. Moderately high one-time payments (Zyn-Fusion) or lower-price subscription tiers (Ardour and Radium) provide excellent ways to generate income for free software projects without having to advertise or nag your users to pay you back, while respecting their freedoms with the software.