Comment by Ekaros
17 days ago
Monetizing open source never made sense for me. Mostly because I operate from selfish viewpoint. Why would I pay for something that is provided for free? It is starting to seem like I was right. You have to fund it from selling a product. Or be one of the few that are valuable enough to be paid for running it. But those are exceedingly rare in total population and don't make scalable business model.
Like he said a lot of OSS works on tiered features, most is free, premium at a premium.
But the main issue is that doesn't work anymore if LLMs have been trained entirely on the free and can generate the premium with ease.
> generate the premium with ease
I don’t think this will be possible for many open core projects. Often the premium features are the more complex and difficult ones. If you could generate those you don’t need the project at all anymore you can just generate the whole thing. Of course that is the wet dream of VCs and would make programmers completely obsolete but I don’t think it’s realistic (at least not anytime soon)
Part of me says that that could be handled with licenses, though for that to work the code probably no longer qualifies as open source either.
Also, I'd guess, the sort of people who are comfortable with asking an LLM to build the premium features are, uh, morally flexible enough to not care about licenses in the first place.
> You have to fund it from selling a product.
Well, no. Most people in the world get paid for doing a thing. I pay someone $X and they do Y for me and then I have the Y that I wanted done.
This can work for software too. Someone pays me to develop software that does something useful for them, and then they have the thing they wanted. For example if Wine is missing a feature someone can pay me to implement it, and then everyone involved is happy.
I agree it's a more challenging business model, but it does work.
Money must come from somewhere. And by selling a product I mean a phone. Or box doing something. With Wine, well Valve sells games and want those games to run on something else than platform they were build for.
In the end product is being sold originally to fund that development. Software can also be pure product enabling company to do something or consumer to do something. But in that case open-source is likely incidental. Not the product.
In your first comment you said, "why would I pay for [software] if it is provided for free?" And you're right, you don't. What you pay for is for someone to develop software/features that don't exist yet. Maybe the users of the phone you sell want some new feature. Then it's done and everyone's happy and even better you don't need to pay for the entire project to be built from scratch or pay ongoing license fees or whatever. That's how you monetize open source.
What are some examples of big OSS projects that work with this model? Aka “pay us to get feature X?”
It sounds to me that this would invite an insane level of bloat and one-off features.
Igalia, Collabora, Red Hat, GCC, LLVM, Wine, the entire Linux kernel. Tons of open source consulting companies out there working on all kinds of projects.
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It's almost always locking some features behind subscription.
Obviously, SSO is the best choice for most deployments. Enterprises (who will probably pay the most) will require SSO.
Open Source is the "free taste". Everyone knows, uses, and likes Grafana. When your company is looking for something, you'll recommend it because you're familiar with it. Your company will want things like SCIM or similar, and pay them for it.
It's harder for products that are trying to sell to smaller companies/individuals, but it still applies.