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.")
Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it.
"Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the founding of the Open Source Initiative, succeeding the free software movement initiated in the 1980s, with the intention of overcoming the ambiguity of the word "free" — meaning both freedom and gratis — to better appeal to the business world."
You can make it work. Odoo is making money selling services, and there are many businesses making money re-selling Odoo in one form or another: partially rebranding, SaaS, support...
A non negligible amount of FOSS follows a similar path: yes, they are OSS, but if you really need it, you'll be better served paying a fee to someone who knows how to make it work properly.
That's a different business model from trying to sell the software itself. Plenty of consultants make a living doing integration work. They don't claim to be in the business of selling FOSS software, though.
Another model is selling an enterprise-grade release that builds atop the FOSS version, but with closed-source features and support. This is the model that nginx (now F5) and haproxy use.
I think a small issue with foss and monetization is that you can accept money for said software hell even release it with expectations that you have to pay for it, but you can't insert a clause in the license that stipulates that the foss rights only applies to paying or paid customers.
Thus there is no legal protection you really got if you go foss as a developer when it comes to ensuring fair compensation.
There is plenty of legal protection: copyright law so far held up pretty well. With the AI laundromat in play it's a completely different story though.
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.")
jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it.
"Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the founding of the Open Source Initiative, succeeding the free software movement initiated in the 1980s, with the intention of overcoming the ambiguity of the word "free" — meaning both freedom and gratis — to better appeal to the business world."
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
You seem to be caught up in the 'free' part of 'free software'. It does not mean 'gratis software'.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
otherme123 · · focus · HN ↗
A non negligible amount of FOSS follows a similar path: yes, they are OSS, but if you really need it, you'll be better served paying a fee to someone who knows how to make it work properly.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
Another model is selling an enterprise-grade release that builds atop the FOSS version, but with closed-source features and support. This is the model that nginx (now F5) and haproxy use.
0dayz · · focus · HN ↗
Thus there is no legal protection you really got if you go foss as a developer when it comes to ensuring fair compensation.
jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
0dayz · · focus · HN ↗
hn_throwaway_99 · · focus · HN ↗
I understand the distinction but have literally never encountered it in practice.
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Also very few software can be sold only on having support, regular users don't care about support.