[jujube3]

What if we collected money from users in exchange for a license to use the software. Then, that money could go to an organization: call it a "company." Then the company could use the money to pay the developers! We could call this idea "proprietary software." I wonder if anyone has thought of it?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

You're confused, apparently thinking there is only one goal: fund software development.

But that's incorrect, there are at least two goals: ensure that software development can continue, and provide users (whoever they may be) with some approximation of GNU's Four Freedoms (freedom to use, freedom to study, freedom to modify, freedom to distribute).

At least, those are the minimal two goals for anyone interested in FLOSS.

[cryptonector]

Whose goals are you talking about? OSI's? Yours? Some average person?

Open source is always part of a business strategy, typically even for individual tinkerers since they can use their own open source work/contributions as part of their portfolio and thus leverage it to get more and better contract work / jobs.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Whose goals are you talking about? OSI's? Yours? Some average person?

Just what I said in the GP: anyone interested in FLOSS

It may be the case that in 2024, lots of people "do open source" as part of a business strategy. But I can assure that it was not so in 1986 (when I first encountered the GNU project) and it wasn't that way in 1999 when I started working on Ardour.

[cryptonector]

> Just what I said in the GP: anyone interested in FLOSS

Except we're not monolithic. We each have our reasons, and one person's rationale for open sourcing (and with what license) may vary by project and with time.

> It may be the case that in 2024, lots of people "do open source" as part of a business strategy. But I can assure that it was not so in 1986 [...]

Not explicitly, perhaps, but already in the 70s there was something of an understanding of mind-share. Building mind-share is easily (IMO) the most important reason to go open source for any given project, though there's others too.

[jujube3]

The freedom to use means the freedom to use without paying. So it is you who is confused.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I'm not confused at all, I've been making a living from the FLOSS DAW I've been developing for the last 24+ years.

There is tension between "free to distribute" (which implies you can get it without paying), as well as "free to modify" (which implies you can build it yourself from source) and "the need to ensure that development continues".

But it is only a tension, not a contradiction. Anyone can get Ardour without paying, yet it raises $200k+ per year to help ensure that development continues.

[cryptonector]

To this day the single most successful open source business model is the SQLite Consortium's. Their approach is to make the codebase open source (public domain even) and the test suite proprietary. Having a fantastic test suite that is proprietary acts to blunt the community's ability to fork the project, and it encourages those who want new features to pay for consortium membership because the team can't easily accept outside contributions (because in order to do so the team has to write tests for those outside contributions). It's brilliant!

[andrewpolidori]

It is an amazing model! I think it works well because it's a library that is "infrastructure" / "support" for other systems though (browsers, android)

I wonder if it applies to the kind of software that is more complete like anything with a UI etc. If I get the final result the tests don't mean much to me.

[cryptonector]

Well, it applies to very popular software. SQLite3 is probably the most popular software ever written. This really might be a special case. But it probably would work for things like: OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, Java, Rust, and a few others. Most if not all of those don't need to change models, which leaves newer / less popular projects, and for those to bootstrap this model is difficult. It might be that the SQLite model is unique -- that it won't be repeated much or at all.

[jujube3]

I wish you well, Paul, and I'm glad that you're making open source work. I was just saying that what Bruce Perens is suggesting isn't open source.

In fact, what Bruce is proposing is a "source under glass" license. Look, but don't touch. Pay to play. Microsoft offers some companies access to the Microsoft Windows source under that kind of license. Is it open source? No.

[marssaxman]

I participated in an extended, large-scale experiment along those lines during the '80s and '90s, and it didn't work very well.

[wmf]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

[cryptonector]

Bill Gates didn't understand mind-share...

[justinclift]

> Then the company could use the money to pay the developers!

Ewww. Why do that?

The company would surely be better off if the owners buy more yachts instead.

/s