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.
Please don't believe that this strategy is "reliable" in any way to get paid, if you or your company need that money for survival. FOSS and especially (A)GPL is just about forcing the balance to put more power in end user's hands, nothing else. A Proprietary+AGPL license combo might get you some cash from business wanting to change the code, but it will still allow any Amazon out there to host your code for free as part of their service catalog, while you are left to go out of business.
> it will still allow any Amazon out there to host your code for free as part of their service catalog, while you are left to go out of business.
Most other licenses allow them to do that without even contributing back improvements, since they're running the software but not distributing it.
Moreover, what is your business supposed to be? When you're selling support contracts or getting paid to make specific improvements to the code, what difference does it even make that some customers are running the software on AWS rather than their own local hardware?
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.
j1elo · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
Most other licenses allow them to do that without even contributing back improvements, since they're running the software but not distributing it.
Moreover, what is your business supposed to be? When you're selling support contracts or getting paid to make specific improvements to the code, what difference does it even make that some customers are running the software on AWS rather than their own local hardware?