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> It's far easier to financially support fully open source software even though it might not happen as much as it should. Sorry for nitpicking, but this is the only thing you've said that I actually disagree with. It is a hell of a fight to convince a company (or even worse, a non-profit) to pay for something that they could get for $0 by self-hosting. Symbolic, one-time gestures are possible to fight for, but a reocurring, significant amount is just not. If your open source project offers anything back in return for payment, it's a much easier sell to make. It doesn't have to be complicated or introduce a lot of overhead, it just has to be something, even it's like a very rarely relied on line of support or a logo on the homepage. Same goes for premium features, you just have to strike that right balance, which I believe we both fully agree on. Your tool has to be useful as a free, standalone product, at least up to a certain scale. I have my grudges about where that line gets drawn sometimes, but I can't hold a grudge about the exististence of such a line. It doesn't stop me from testing out your product. It is of course a shame that we don't have to go through any of this for any fully proprietary product. It is what it is, it's just a question of whether it's worth the per-user price. There are tons of companies out there that have used an open source product for years, never paid a single dime, and then switched to a proprietary, very expensive solution. There's also a lot of us disgruntled sysadmin/DevOps/SRE people along the way, but our powers are limited. Make it a little bit easier for us by charging for something we can't otherwise get from your free version. It's mutually beneficial for everyone involved: we do our best to give you some money (in return for something), sometimes we're succesful, and then that success usually contributes back to the fully open sourced version being better in some ways. Individual donations are fine, I do them as well (less consistently than I'd like to; far from nothing), but convincing just one single company to pay up beats the hell out of 100 individuals. It's a fixed, agreed upon sum, usually guaranteed for a period of time by some type of a contract. There's also only one processing fee involved. It is always gonna be difficult to find that first one, but if you pull it off, the odds of your open source project "succeeding" (however you define success) increases dramatically. |