[j1elo]

Open Source has worked fine here. The author doesn't find financial support for the work, so they just want to change winds and that's a perfectly fine path forward.

If this is really much more than a personal project "for fun, on my leisure time", and it became an actually serious product-level project that provides good value in commercial environments for people, there's clearly an opportunity for a for-profit company to step in and cover that niche. But that'd require that users became customers and actually departed from their money to pay for it :)

I guess most will switch instead to asking who's the next project maintainer to work on it, to whom the new bug reports and complaints can continue to be sent for free. But if there's money to be made by using a tool, there should be money paid for using it too. We "just" need to find the new generation of FOSS Financial Sustainability solutions that actually work! Donations don't make the cut.

[hosh]

Something I learned about being a part of an ecosystem: if you want it, you need to support it and help it stay alive.

That applies to local shops as it does open source projects.

[briffle]

The project has never even had a donation button on its page, only a link with a few sponsors.

[SwellJoe]

The effort to setup donations is almost always more trouble than the donations that result are worth. Better spent looking for a job, or working on a commercial project that will make money. People simply don't donate to open source projects at a level that matters.

I've been working on Open Source software for 30+ years. There's no money in it, if your idea for making money is "accept donations". I don't like it, but it's a fact. If you want to make money, you have to make something that isn't free (and even then, if you give away the most valuable parts, as in "open core" licensing, you probably still won't make enough money to make the development worth it).

When I was young and driven by idealism and optimism, I assumed that with enough users I'd be able to ring the cash register somehow. Turns out not so much. We got the users, the money never came. There are a few outliers, but there probably aren't a lot of opportunities to found a Red Hat today.

[artyom]

Second this. There's no money in donations. Also the target demographics for donations is individuals, who rarely donate and are kind of desensitized to the whole thing at this stage (as everyone and their mother asks for donations).

Companies need to jump through legal and accounting loopholes to donate, they very much prefer a simple purchase, which is nice! But setting up actual purchases is a whole different ordeal with open source, now the question is why is the company paying for something that's free?

Source: my own 5-stars open source project with 500k+ active users that paid for 3 coffees in total over 10+ years. I still get like $2 sometimes after a long while.

[SwellJoe]

The most annoying thing is the people who demand most loudly that you setup donations don't actually donate once you go to the trouble to do so. We had a guy make an issue about it in github, and followed up over and over...we finally did it. Nothing. I guess they think making demands is helping.

[hosh]

It is not necessarily monetary or even transactional form of support. Reciprocity builds relationships.

Not necessarily even code contributions. It could be professional networking. It is a bit different if the person is not a stranger.

[spockz]

I wonder whether the author has considered taking the product to a paid level and what would be necessary for it.

Obviously, all contributors have some form of copyright, which may or may not have been waived depending on whether there was an ACL in place and jurisdiction. So he would need to get permission from the copyright holders, maybe in exchange for a percentage of the profit.

[j1elo]

Changing the license of already existing code? You might not be able to do that without permission from other contributors, I agree.

But it's MIT license. We can open a company tomorrow, take that code, and start selling it. Further development and improvements of the code could be trivially done openly or behind closed doors. FWIW the author themselves could do that if they wanted.

[spockz]

If “we” can do it, the original author should also be able to do it. However, I’m not sure whether the MIT license is enough to waive intellectual property in all jurisdictions, meaning that some contributions are still owned by the contributors themselves, especially in certain jurisdictions.

[pasc1878]

ANd that gets rather looked on here as the authors being deceitful and not really Open Source doing a bait and switch.

[tracker1]

I've been working on a software package I'm hoping to release in a few months... I'm really torn on either split FLOSS with commercial extensions, or just going fully private... I was planning on a pretty generous free tier, but hoping to make a bit on the side from commercial customers.

It's a bit of a niche as it is, so that's going to be rough in any kind of pricing model, as a large part of that niche is either homebrew types and the other commercial industry that will likely require some more integrations and customization.

[bartread]

You could dual license as well, so it’s GPL or AGPL for personal, OSS, or academic use, but requires a paid for commercial license for commercial use.

I suggest GPL or AGPL because their copyleft clauses make them hostile towards platform providers who might otherwise seek to profit from your work without paying.

[j1elo]

Platform providers can take (A)GPL code as-is and totally profit from it without paying.

As long as they keep releasing sources of their own modifications -if they ever do any-, the rest is fair play.

[bartread]

Yeah, but the copyleft makes anything they build around it a derivative work that they also have to release sources for - especially with AGPL. Most don’t want to do that because that’s where their IP lives.

Not all open source licenses are copyleft licenses (e.g., MIT very much isn’t), but at the very least copyleft licenses make it much harder to exploit open source code commercially without giving back in some way, whether that’s code, or cash for a commercial license.

Not perfect, by any means, but definitely an improvement over more permissive licenses.

I am aware of how much I’m starting to sound a bit like RMS in my old age.

[tracker1]

It would be dual license effectively... the base version AGPL and the Commercial version with additional functionality. Though I'd considered BSL and alternatives... and as mentioned, just closed/commercial only.