I get sad about this. This project moved from an open source model to a closed source one. I have nothing but sympathy for the team for doing this but I do wonder if there is an alternative way of monetizing and keeping the project open source.
Seriously- what are the monetization strategies for open source projects? I know red hat, hashicorp and others sell a enterprise support and hosting solution as enterprise add ons to their open source projects. Wordpress seems like a great community built around building widgets for non technical folks, but have the source code available for programmers to extend and modify.
Is it possible for one to sell software and have it open source?
I think the market for people who want books hosted and the market for people with enough dev skills to do it themself is separate. So they should be able to make their revenue from people who want easy hosting.
That being said, it seems like a doomed SaaS because the value add is pretty minimal. Maybe a one time charge would make sense, but I can’t find much value in monthly fees for something I can host on github.io for free.
The software is nice, but there are others.
In general, I don’t like “artificial” SaaS where the the fee is rent-seeking for something software runs for near zero marginal costs.
Seriously- what are the monetization strategies for open source projects? I know red hat, hashicorp and others sell a enterprise support and hosting solution as enterprise add ons to their open source projects. Wordpress seems like a great community built around building widgets for non technical folks, but have the source code available for programmers to extend and modify.
Is it possible for one to sell software and have it open source?