There’s nothing dishonest about just straight up charging, as long as you’re honest about what you’re charging.

I agree. I tried selling books, but it felt like the articles were just marketing funnels to the books. Still, I didn't do real copywriting.

After a while I changed to donations Because the idea was to help people. And my day job pays 6 figs.

We need more people like you in this world.

Please breed if you can ;-) Hum, I mean, transmit who you are to other, infect them with greatness, however you can (books is a great idea, teaching and mentoring as well).

FWIW I think there's an ethical way to profit, but we have to be willing to wait for the value we created to actually materialize in the real world. A not-so-rare case, I think, is people donating large amounts to their mentors, once they "get there", once they're established and earning enough (likely 2-5 years after the mentorship or transmission took place; sometimes way more).

You certainly can't live from those returns. Some of them might be fabulous though, if what you transmitted was really life-changing. I guess. Never been on that side of things (gave, did not receive) but I'm thinking putting out the value is the mission, and anything else is a secondary concern (just keep that day job to pay the bills).

Have a great one.

No cookies, no ads, source code always available, pay for a prebuilt version, user names price ... in excess of $100k/year (after 20 years :) ... ardour.org

I'd love to see a graph of that income over those 20 years! Also, do you get any license payments from Harrison Consoles? And if yes, are those included in the 100k per year?

There is a small "back payment" from Harrison, but it is not included in the cited numbers. I work closely with Harrison and they have worked very hard to not make Mixbus a "fork" of Ardour.

Note that there was essentially zero income for the first 8 years, and then a slow, steady rise once I needed to make a living again and instituted the Radiohead-inspired "pay tunnel".

Thinking about going open source but too afraid of hostile forks. How do you prevent people from stealing the business?

The world is full of risks. Got to deal with them.

It helped that I had 8 years (post-amzn) not needing to make any income and thus able to build a large amount of goodwill and visibility within relevant communities.

People do "steal" the software in the sense of putting it into DVD/ISO packages that they charge for.

My concern has never been that everyone pays, only that enough people pay. But perhaps that's why Ableton Live changed the zeitgeist of computer music production, and Ardour is just ... Ardour.

By hostile you mean stolen GPL and included into proprietary tech? Or another, competing GPL product?

Lets say some of the contributors want a piece of the cake, they make their own website, SEO, and actively tell everyone that their fork is better.

The GPL license give you better protection then say MIT in this regard though.

Charge, and double the money you charge. But don't be sneaky about it. Say what you charge, and then charge exactly what you said you'd charge.

We need a directory of sites like that.