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by troels 4681 days ago
There's definitely some problems with this business model. On one hand, having a premium product means that Igor won't be contributing as much features to the open source version. On the other hand, it might discourage 3rd party developers from contributing features that are already covered by the premium product. There's probably some upsides as well, but it's certainly not without its issues.
1 comments
ProblemFactory 4681 days ago
Having a premium product could also mean that the open-source version grows faster.

Having stable revenue means the ability to spend 100% of the time working on the project (instead of it being a side project), and hire more full-time employees. It is possible that as a result both the pro and open-source versions improve faster than in an only-volunteer open-source project.

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troels 4681 days ago
That's a good point. Although, so far, the project has evolved pretty well, so it doesn't seem to remedy a current problem.

An alternative strategy to ensure it to do so in the future, could be to build a team of open source contributors to take charge of the further development of the project. As a user, I would prefer this, as it doesn't have the inherent conflicts of interests that a premium/free model has.

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