What have we missed?
This point is interesting, because it assumes the only way to do premium is with a closed-source version, losing the open-source benefits.
Personally I've had good success (i.e. comfortably enough income as a solo bootstrapped project that I can work on open source full time) doing a freemium approach that's 100% open-source for http://httptoolkit.tech
Yes, anybody can fork the project and remove the payment checks (here: https://github.com/httptoolkit/httptoolkit-ui/blob/5cf0b10c6...) but it's a non-trivial hassle to fork everything and hook it all up, and means ongoing maintenance work to manage a fork forever, so at the price it's not really worth any serious professional's time (and I give out free licenses for everybody who contributes to the code anyway).
Works well, lets you stay 100% open source, which is good for everybody and encourages contributions, and you can still make enough money to fund development (never going to make anybody a billionaire, but that's not the point).
What you do is you become a "VC" and get a bunch of guys to build on top of "open source" with a X-as-a-Service based subscription model, and then you contribute pennies back (and usually: just posting issues to the open source stuff you use to get slaves to slave away for free).
This is because free software is not a business model. Free software is an ethical stance, around which any number of business models may conceivably be constructed.
If you work at a huge corporation that has vanity projects, expect churn, politics, infighting, useless initiatives for promotion and mediocre code quality.
The software source code is released day one, but it won't be a FOSS license until YEAR+N. The license switch will be automatic after the deadline.
That way I think I can have the best of both worlds: making sure development is paid (which is often necessary to sustain any large project) and any additional valuable development being be paid for, but also giving your customers the guarantee that they'll have an exit against vendor lock-in, and releasing in the long term to the FOSS community.
Basically I sell software normally, but commit to a future FOSS license at the same time. It's not unlike patents actually, at least what they should be.
I plan to sell a hosted service, but hopefully I will be in a position where I actually WANT AWS to yoink the code and run a competitive service, so it can feed into better business models.
Open Core is distasteful in my opinion because it limits the growth of the open project. (no no I won't accept that relevant Pull Request, because I want to sell this feature as proprietary)
GPL/copyleft is not right for me either, in fact I want to HELP people fork for their own companies and profits.
So, once Amazon finally launches their competitor service, I can still:
- compete with AWS on product and User Experience
- sell early access/license to the open source code
- sell courseware subscriptions+packages
- sell first-party support
- crowdfund feature development
- sell consulting servicesAlso Bounties Network link is https://bounties.network/, without the www. With the www it doesn't work on my browser.
I think the open core model works, and is great marketing strategy.
Customers at the end of the day are willing to pay for polished finished products, but giving them an exit path-way should you fail and burn all your VC money, gives some ease vs going for a fully closed-source commercial product, even if some parts of the product aren't available (or only under enterprise edition)
YMMV, but I think it's a good think for open source to have found an hybrid model between free vs paid software dichotomy
He’s been tremendously successful with open core + paid pro features.
OSS developers: do you want to get paid for the work you've done (i.e. with no requirement to fix bugs or add new features)?
We're in this bucket as well with our product https://github.com/avo-hq/avo
Thankfully I've managed to get sustainable growth as a solo open source maintainer by offering licenses for advanced features only businesses would need.
"The failure of the open-source movement is ultimately a failure of imagination.
Let’s back up a bit. When I talk about the “failure” of the open-source movement, I don’t simply mean that systemic underfunding of crucial open-source projects has led to incidents like the Heartbleed saga, whereby a vulnerability in an important software library called OpenSSL undermined the integrity of a large part of the internet. [...] Open source’s biggest failure is philosophical.
Free as in Freedom
For me, the best parts of the open-source movement were always the remnants of the “free software movement” from which it evolved. During the early days of the movement in the 1980s, best captured by Richard Stallman’s book Free Software, Free Society, there were no corporate conferences featuring branded lanyards and sponsored lunches. Instead, it was all about challenging the property rights that had granted software companies so much power in the first place. Stallman himself was possibly the movement’s best-known evangelist, traveling around the world to preach about software freedom and the evils of applying patent law to code.
Stallman framed the argument for free software in moral terms, positioning it as not only technically but ethically superior to proprietary software, which he saw as a “social problem.” And he practiced what he preached: in his personal life, Stallman went to great lengths to avoid using proprietary software, even to the point of not owning a cell phone.
But it wasn’t until the free software movement shed its rebellious roots and rebranded as the more business-friendly “open-source movement” that it really took off. One of the most crucial figures in this effort was Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who built his business empire by identifying the pieces of the free software movement that could be commodified. Suddenly, corporations that had previously considered open source to be dangerously redolent of “communism” were starting to see its value, both as a way of building software and as a recruitment tactic. From there, an entire ecosystem of virtue-signaling opportunities sprang up around the marriage of convenience between the corporate world and open source: conference and hackathon sponsorships, “summers of code,” libraries released under open licenses but funded by for-profit corporations.
If that counts as a victory, however, it was a pyrrhic one. In the process of gaining mainstream popularity, the social movement of “free software”—which rejected the very idea of treating software as intellectual property—morphed into the more palatable notion of “open source” as a development methodology, in which free and proprietary software could happily co-exist. The corporations that latched onto the movement discovered a useful technique for developing software, but jettisoned the critique of property rights that formed its ideological foundation."