[malwarebytess]

There's several 100+ million dollar businesses where I live that make their money on phone support/installation/deployment of open source software they maintain. Nobody pays for the software, but they'll pay out the nose on a yearly basis for support.

[curryst]

That creates a perverse incentive where you want your open source stuff to be hard to use so people have to pay you.

Plus there's no guarantee that the developers will be the ones making money. There's a lot of ire at Amazon because of that.

[kawsper]

It happens with paid subscriptions as well.

Some examples of this, that I can think of:

- Varnish Cache where you need a paid subscription, or community patches and you have to do the compilation yourself, to make it understand SRV-records instead of hardcoding IPs or hostnames.

- Nginx also need a paid subscription to understand SRV-records.

Both of these companies have realized that in order for people to effectively run the software within a cluster, you need support for SRV-records to get service discovery working.

[dudus]

Or even worse, it creates an incentive for the big cloud conglomerates to offer that software as a managed service and pocket the revenue.

[alisonkisk]

That's what Affero GPL is for.

[malwarebytess]

I don't agree. One example of this business plan is the best software of its category on the market: open dental software.

[whit537]

TIL. Neat! :)

https://www.opendental.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Dental