On paying for software
Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Are the available options stacked against them?<p>Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients using open source software. But what if you don&#x27;t want to be a consultant and simply want to charge a business for using your open source product?<p>The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can sell your free software by charging for distribution (for example via CD-ROMs). Physical media made sense in an era of dial-up modems and low-bandwidth connections, but no-one can realistically charge for distribution today - not least when so many projects are hosted for free on GitHub. See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;selling.en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;selling.en.html</a><p>So what are the alternatives?<p>- There&#x27;s the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. (Naturally doesn&#x27;t work with permissive licences. Requires a strong copyleft licence like the GPL).<p>- The open core approach e.g. GitLab.<p>- There&#x27;s also the option of charging for support only - I&#x27;m guessing this is an unattractive and unappealing option for many developers who&#x27;d much rather be building their product.<p>- Or there&#x27;s the Kickstarter or Patreon approach which simply isn&#x27;t a stable, sustainable long-term solution.<p>There have been some alternative licence approaches such as the Fair Source licence (fair.io). This is neither open source or closed source but allows developers to charge for their software.<p>The large market for Wordpress plugins is an interesting case study. Wordpress is published under the GPL v2, but many Wordpress plugins are not open source. No one polices this, but those plugin developers are selling their software to businesses who are willing to pay for the features of those plugins.<p>So who here in 2018 has made a success selling their open source software? Did you follow one of the models above? And who has struggled to make it work?