There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren’t OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also been targets of vitriol.
So, let’s say we wanted to make it possible for the majority of developers to work on software that strictly follows the definition of opensource, which models would be acceptable to make enough money to work on those projects full-time?
Universal basic income
The best solution for a lot of problems. Imagine how awesome OSS could be if any dev could work on it at least part-time while still being able to eat and pay rent/mortgage.
Imagine how awesome any creative field could be
I’m for it but what do we do in the meantime?
Personally I like the following two approaches:
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Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)
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Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)
I think those approaches are fully compatible with the open source definition, but please correct me if I am wrong. (The examples I mentioned are just some of which I personally know and use, but of course they are many others)
I would add:
- Paid 24/7 support
- Pay for custom features
- Accept donations
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How would this look like? Are you suggesting a different license? Or is it more something like paid binaries but the code stays open?
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Both of those aren’t opensource (at least I can’t find their repos on their webpages), but I see the model your proposing. Maybe just providing an option to pay at all, and not make it a donation, could work. The only problem I see is a competitor swooping in with a bigger team (or a team in the first place), and building upon the existing project to kill it in order to end up selling its own product. With non-restrictive opensource licenses like MIT and Apache, I assume it would be trivial. GPLv3 would make that a little harder.
Cost for commercial, free for personal may not always be open source. Redis for example.
Also paid integrations into your existing environment.
Proxmox does this.
Syncthing has vendor support - they use ST in integrations.
Both seem like effective models
Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)
Do you believe anything should be done if a large competitor takes over the business of hosting for other companies and hosting is the major revenue stream of the opensource project?
Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)
That sounds like Open Core and I am for this, but there seems to be a dissatisfaction within the loud part of the opensource community regarding it. They don’t consider it “open-source”. Do you still count it as opensource?
Your proposals concern services or applications. Do you have any thoughts on opensource that isn’t that e.g libraries, frameworks, protocols, and so on?
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My partner is on SSDI for disability. If she works, she will lose her SSDI income, but she’s allowed to generate income that isn’t work/labor.
She is exploring FOSS as a career path because she could accept donations and that wouldn’t impact her SSDI. She understands donations would be minimal, but she’s hoping it’s a way for her to break into the FOSS scene.
Three examples of open source software where at least one developer could give up their regular job and work full-time on the open source project. I’m sure there’s more (The Linux kernel maybe ?) :
- Mastodon
- Lichess
- SerenityOS
In both cases possible because of people donating. The last example is quite remarkable given the personal history of the developer and the fact that it was “just” a fun project with the developer sharing videos about programming for the fun project.
KDE also has multiple full time employees afaik
Serenity does have donors, but most of the donations are for Ladybird, their libre browser stack separate from Mozilla/Safari/Chromium. Most of the money came specifically from donors looking for improved support for their own websites on Ladybird.
Okay. Got a source for that ? I had the impression from the SerenityOS developer that the donations came because of the videos that Andreas is making but I could be wrong.
https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-ladybird-sponsor not sure about the other anonymous donation he received.
WARNING. Everything other than the last paragraph is kind of rude and opinionated, so skip to the bottom if you only want practical advice and not a philosophical rant.
First of all Free Software don’t need paid developers. We scruffy hackers create software because it’s fun. I have a strong suspicion that the commercialization of Free Software via the businessfriendly clothing “Open Source” is actually creating a lot of shitty software or at least a lot of good software that’ll be obsoleted to keep business going. Capitalization of Free Software doesn’t have an incentive to create good finished software, quite the opposite. The best open source software from commercial entities is in my opinion those that were open sourced when a product was no longer profitable as a proprietary business. As examples I love the ID software game engines and Blender. Others seem happy that Sun dumped the source code of Star Office, which then became OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but then again companies like Collabora are trying to turn it into a shitty webification instead of implementing real collaborative features into the software like what AbiWord has.
…and back in the real world where you need to buy food. Open Source consultancy, implementation of custom out-of-tree features, support, courses and training, EOL maintainance or products that leaverage Open Source software is my best answer. See Free Software as a commons we all contribute to, so that we can do things with it and built things from it. You should not expect people to pay for Free Software, but you can sell things that take advantage of Free Software as a resource.
Why do they need to make a full time living from working on these projects?
I don’t understand why this is suddenly an issue - I use a 40 year old free program daily (Emacs), which has always been developed for free by volunteers (including me).
Think about the software you use - IME software created to make someone richer is usually worse than software written out of passion.
I think the route of giving it all away for free and either offering hosting if the project needs it or (business) support is the most successful way of doing this.
I have no problems whatsoever with donation buttons / banners (like Krita does) but I’m afraid random donations is not really a sustainable model for most projects. I try to remember to donate to projects I use a lot (especially if it’s for work) but it is another thing on my todo list and not one with high priority, so I don’t do it as often as I’d like … 😓
That’s possibly fine for services, but what happens when a large, well-known competitor decides to offer the service at a lower price (possibly on their own infrastructure), takes away the customers, but doesn’t contribute back?
Also, how should libraries (aka stuff that can’t be hosted or doesn’t have an interface) be handled?
Yeah, very good points. A while ago there was talk about some kind of foundation where maintainers could bill their hours and people and big tech companies could donate. Not sure if / how that would work …
During the xz incident I also talked about this on Mastodon and someone suggested that big tech could just employ maintainers without them having to do anything for the company directly, just work on the project / library the company uses. Again not everybody would want to do that …
I’m afraid there’s no easy one-fits-all solution here.
Do you believe breaking away from the strict OSI opensource definition would be acceptable? It could allow things like:
- royalties for commercial instances
- service fees for commercial instances
- no commercial use
not all at one of course
As mentioned in books published TWENTY YEARS AGO, many companies working in Open-Source make their money in value-added services and support.
My side gig has been doing that for the last 22 years.
And, that’s the number-one answer from chatGPT.
It’s also totally okay to not blithely jam the words together but to pretend hyphens are a thing.
As mentioned in books published TWENTY YEARS AGO, many companies working in Open-Source make their money in value-added services and support.
And the world hasn’t changed in 20 years?
It’s also totally okay to not blithely jam the words together but to pretend hyphens are a thing.
What?
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Premium support channels - This is basically how RedHat and Canonical make their money, while offering FOSS for individuals.
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Donations - KDE and GNOME are largely donor-backed, both by individuals and corporate entities.
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Commissions on features - Collabora for example is commissioned by Valve to improve KDE and SteamOS.
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Software licenses - Certain FOSS licenses may permit paid access to software as long as the source is open i think? There are also source-available eg. Asperite that are open source, but only offer binaries for customers.
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Add on services - Your FOSS web app can offer paid hosting and management for clients. Your distro can offer ISOs with extra pre-downloaded software for a fee (Zorin). You can partner with hardware to distribute your software (Manjaro, KDE).
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Hired by a company to work on your project and integrate with their own stack. This is what Linus Torvalds did with Linux when he was first hired by Transmeta - part of his time was spent working on Linux to work better with the technology Transmeta used.
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