If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
There's nothing stopping you, true. But I think you will find that nobody is going to buy software for whatever thousands of dollars it took you to make it. So the limitation in this case is a practical one, not a legal or moral one.
That's kind of black and white thinking though. No one is going to pay a million dollars for QuickBooks, but a lot of people paid several hundreds. Just because no one pays you to develop a new QuickBooks (at least pre LLM), doesn't mean there's not a market there.
Isn't that the whole point of crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter?
Developer presents the idea and how much it costs. If enough people pitch in, then the idea is funded, the developer gets the money as a lump sum and can turn the idea into reality.
I can't possibly take this at face value since it's obvious that people (businesses) pay others many tens or hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to build software for them. So, what do you really mean?
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
askvictor · · focus · HN ↗
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
rpcope1 · · focus · HN ↗
yjftsjthsd-h · · focus · HN ↗
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
Developer presents the idea and how much it costs. If enough people pitch in, then the idea is funded, the developer gets the money as a lump sum and can turn the idea into reality.
Why did this model fail?
HeyLaughingBoy · · focus · HN ↗