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 is a pretty reliable way to do this. Which is to distribute the code under two licenses, where one of them is the AGPL and the other is a paid license.
AGPL allows you to satisfy the free software people (and the free-as-in-beer people) and correspondingly win market share and get code contributions etc., but it also scares a lot of large corporations (whether or not it should). And if their in-house bureaucrats won't let them license code under the AGPL but they still want to use it then it leaves them to pay you for the other license. Meanwhile the bureaucratic corporations are the ones with the resources to pay you anyway.
Accepting contributions when you do this is a bit weird. They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it. This is why the “open-source” database companies (all of which dual-license) don’t accept contributions.
> They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it.
They can't accept contributions under the AGPL, but what stops them from accepting contributions under e.g. the BSD license? Does the BSD code stop Apple from selling macOS?
There is a meaningful difference between allowing someone to use your code for whatever and assigning the rights to it so that you can no longer use it.
And requiring contributions under BSD/MIT doesn't seem to be a huge problem for the projects that actually use those licenses.
The bigger problem they have is that nobody uses e.g. FreeBSD because if they do anything interesting the code just ends up in Linux/macOS/Windows whereas the reverse doesn't happen.
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.")
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
AGPL allows you to satisfy the free software people (and the free-as-in-beer people) and correspondingly win market share and get code contributions etc., but it also scares a lot of large corporations (whether or not it should). And if their in-house bureaucrats won't let them license code under the AGPL but they still want to use it then it leaves them to pay you for the other license. Meanwhile the bureaucratic corporations are the ones with the resources to pay you anyway.
pclmulqdq · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
They can't accept contributions under the AGPL, but what stops them from accepting contributions under e.g. the BSD license? Does the BSD code stop Apple from selling macOS?
pclmulqdq · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
And requiring contributions under BSD/MIT doesn't seem to be a huge problem for the projects that actually use those licenses.
The bigger problem they have is that nobody uses e.g. FreeBSD because if they do anything interesting the code just ends up in Linux/macOS/Windows whereas the reverse doesn't happen.