|
|
|
|
|
|
by aseipp
1317 days ago
|
|
|
No, that's just wishful thinking so FOSS developers can get on a high horse and not look in the mirror. "Seeking donations to support development" and "Making large users pay for a license" are completely different income models. A few licenses for commercial software with ongoing support can easily cover years of community donations, in my experience. Coincidentally, guess which one of those two models is the most successful as far as "allowing independent software developers to support themselves" goes? That said, mold I think is a difficult project to monetize broadly for a few reasons, but certainly nowhere close to impossible, and I do believe it's a project that can support a couple developers, with some clients. And I believe it's going to be vastly easier to do that than relying donations and draining your savings account, if I'm being honest, with a bit of experience in this realm. Let's not tell ourselves lies. Corporate, commercial software development, for money, and licensing software under pay-for-use terms, is how almost all software developers make money. Not by GitHub donations and wishful thinking and pontificating on Hacker News. In fact many of these entities even use open source/free software to accelerate the development of their products, so they can be licensed for the same amount of money, yet they don't contribute anything back — despite the fact their production costs were lower than they would be otherwise. The idea here is to increase the "surplus value" (google it) that they can capture. I will leave readers to think about these words since they are relevant to this discussion and the story of mold. |
|
|
Most software by far is developed and supported in-house, not sold as a COTS product. For in-house software that doesn't see any broader distribution, the distinction between "open" and "proprietary" is pretty much immaterial. Even the comparatively strict GPL license allows for private modification.