Without discussing the merits of Nuitka or this guy, in my opinion, the following is a recipe for disaster:
Please become a subscriber of Nuitka commercial, even if you do not need the IP protection features it mostly has. All essential packaging and performance features are free, and I have put incredible amounts of works in this, and I need to now make a living off it.
Right now, I am far from being able to sustain my income from it, and I am taking a risk with this effort, hoping for support from you.
In a few years we will have a blog post about how Oss is not able to provide sustainable income and maybe the thing will switch to an hybrid license if possible.
I like the idea of software freedom as much as the next guy, but software being free for noncommercial use is significantly more important to me (and I think many people) than being fully free-as-in-freedom. If hybrid licensing makes it possible to make a living developing free-ish software, which is still essentially free for "the commons" but not for corporations (which lest we forget are not actually people), then I think that's better than the alternative of everything being proprietary. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
We will need to see a major culture shift in industry towards paying for support for free software before that can change. It's ridiculous that companies are willing to shell out so much money for proprietary SaaS products (especially in the data engineering space), but are not willing to pay for support/consulting of open-source products, even if the latter is cheaper. It's not entirely rational, but it's the way things are, and we are still a couple of years off from anything being different.
Well-intentioned developers deserve to make a living on free-ish software more than I deserve fully free software.
Paying a solo developer for support of their application is a nice idea in theory, but hard to sell internally when the cap on "how much is this worth to us" is lower than the cost of the lawyers it would take to get terms agreed with that developer. The change we need is not in the open-source ecosystem, but inside companies where so much value and attention is squandered by legal, marketing and other departments which can be grouped under ass-covering.
Are you from nestle?...because they think exactly this about water...even if the earth gives it for free, but hey please earn your right to breathe air...and lets see how far you come.
Aren't earning & deserving two sides of the same coin? You deserve something because you did what was necessary to earn it - you earnt it so you deserve it?
e.g. in GP's comment - the 'well-intentioned developers' 'deserve' to make a living, because they earnt it by making the nice 'free-ish software' and being 'well-intentioned' etc.?
If you are talking to a manager and you can't get them to understand why they need to pay the Nuitka author, talk about insurance. "If this guy doesn't get paid, he will abandon a key piece of our infrastructure (which speeds everything up by at least 3x, saving us X dollars/year) and we will be stuck with a maintenance time bomb in our system. If we pay this tiny fraction of what he is worth as a consultant, we are effectively joining an industrial alliance to support this technology. It's a good deal, think of this as out sourcing to the competent. If we don't pay him, we can use his stuff for free for a little while, but we will have a huge charge of Y dollars to pull his stuff out when he needs to get another job. Refactoring our system at that time will be risky and expensive, and we will get nothing for it. Think about this is cheap insurance, or hedging a bet. It's a good deal, I would sleep better at night if I knew the rest of our system could be structured this way."
> If you are talking to a manager and you can't get them to understand why they need to pay the Nuitka author, talk about insurance. "If this guy doesn't get paid, he will abandon a key piece of our infrastructure (which speeds everything up by at least 3x, saving us X dollars/year) and we will be stuck with a maintenance time bomb in our system. If we pay this tiny fraction of what he is worth as a consultant, we are effectively joining an industrial alliance to support this technology.
I've burned myself twice on this approach. Shortly after I/we started supporting them they changed their license terms. Of course since we were now paying customers we could still use it, but a significant reasons why I advocated for that software in the first place was because it was open source, and now I feel cheated and the advice I gave the company I worked for at that point turned out to be less valuable.
I do sometimes feel that once one get the taste for that sweet sweet recurring revenue it is hard to not start optimizing for it.
For completeness; it has also worked beautifully at least once.
And I guess I'll probably argue again for supporting open source.
But maybe I'll be a little more careful and try to ensure they can't pull these kinds of tricks on me (if a project accepts code contributions and doesn't have a CLA, it will be hard for them to pull such a bait and switch).
> If you are talking to a manager and you can't get them to understand why they need to pay the Nuitka author, talk about insurance
Finance is a significant obstacle to this goal. Multiple times I have been told, “There is a budget surplus-does anyone have any nice-to-haves we should purchase?” More than once, I have suggested (modest) donations towards open source project X that enables us to operate. Not once have I succeeded.
Not a real charity. Not a real purchase. Good will towards something already free does not make a compelling business case up the chain of command.
Except that your marginal payment doesn't actually work as insurance - if you're the only one to do it then Nuitka would still be abandoned, whereas if lots of others pay then your one payment is probably not going to make much difference to their decision.
I'm playing devil's advocate there: I do actually think it is the right thing to do to pay the author. But I don't think your argument would work with a manager.
This. The whole argument for donating is wrong, at least from the enterprise point of view.
If you want $$$ from enterprise, offer them cost saving or money making tech and charge for it. It can be built on top of your OSS, in fact this is a great way to get in touch with the companies... But don't rely on charity. In the companies I worked for paying for something you can get for free is simply not done, ever.
While I'd love for making money from open source to work like this, you're right, it doesn't. This is essentially an appeal to charity, but the problem is that companies aren't good at donating to charity! If you're an engineer at a company, it's the path of least resistance to NOT pay for this, so that's 99% of users accounted for. Then even for the 1% who are happy to put the effort in, getting this through budgeting when there's so little up-side for the company is hard. It's not even like charitable donations which may be tax efficient and something the company can use for marketing purposes.
I'd suggest finding the features or support systems that only companies really care about and charging for them. Support, paid feature development, etc.
As much as I sympathise with this person and what he's doing, I must say I agree with you.
> This is essentially an appeal to charity.
...the problem is that it's not even very clearly an appeal to charity. It's sort of blurring a freemium opencore commercial model with charity.
Paying for the premium-tier of a freemium product is one possible message to put out there. An appeal to charity is quite another. They are different messages appealing to different motivations. But when combined, they sort of diminish each other's effectiveness as a possible sales message.
If I get into my charitable frame of mind, it produces cognitive dissonance to think that maybe this project doesn't need my charity if there are commercial users out there who can sustain the product by paying for the premium tier (as well they should if they make profitable use of the premium features).
If I get into my business purchaser frame of mind, it produces cognitive dissonance to hear the author talk of my purchasing decision as an act of charity. It makes me think that even the sales guy acknowledges that I won't be getting anything worth what I'm paying for here.
Not only that, but they also imply very different kinds of contracts, and as someone paying for this, I'd like to know which contract I'm getting into.
If it's a commercial contract, I expect some kind of warranty that everything will work, and some kind of support or right to my money back if it doesn't. That's just implied in a commercial deal of any kind. (And frequently that's the piece in an open core business model that you pay for when you pay for the premium tier). So if I pay, and I take my problem to the source, I don't then want to hear "Sorry, can't help you out, but I did say from the beginning that the money I took from you was more of a donation than a payment for a commercial deal of any kind, and it's kind of uncharitable of you to now expect me to fix your problem if it distracts me from building new features which, ostensibly, you were supposed to be supporting."
Agreed, and it reminds me of an old psych experiment: participants were asked to do a simple chore like make a hot drink (I forget the details). Those that were paid nothing did it in the same time as those paid a significant amount, while those paid only a few pennies took a lot longer. Even though a few pennies is strictly speaking more than nothing, it changed the nature of the action from a kind gesture to transactional.
the problem is that companies aren't good at donating to charity!
You hit the nail on the head right there.
I know a billion-dollar company that uses all kinds of "free for personal use, $$$ for commercial use" software, and pays exactly $0 for the software.
Even where I work, I've had to choose commercial software over open source solutions because I can't get any middle manager to understand that paying people for work they've already done for free is the right thing to do.
And don't even get me started on the whole "If it's not available at CDW, we don't need it" crap.
It's refreshing to see that candid disclosure upfront.
IMHO, one of the most important qualities of an engineer is honesty.
I'd take the concern about sustainability into consideration, but being upfront about the need to make money from this is more reassuring than a lot of the fake-it-till-you-make-it that we see.
If you want to make a living with Free Software, and the software is primarily used by businesses, take a very close look at Red Hat's business model. They nailed it perfectly. They don't dual license their software, it's all Free Software. They don't ask for donations. They sell a package of software and support that is almost identical to what you get from commercial business software. The only difference is the software just happens to be Free (That's why CentOS was able to exist, they didn't violate any of Red Hat's copyrights).
I wish more open source developers understood this. Corporations love the business model and Red Hat makes tons of money, they turn around and add to and create more and more Free Software, and those of us that are not corporations with deep pockets can still use and benefit from the software.
I know what you're saying but it is regrettable. The problem lies with people who want stuff for absolutely nothing, even if it's valuable to their work. Short-termism at work.
This is not people explicitly wanting something for nothing. The issue is that in a corporation the incentives of the engineer and the person who controls budgets are at odds.
The bean counter won't really be rewarded (not directly at least) for the engineer and the engineer's team being successful, but they'll be definitely penalized for being haphazard with finances. Ergo, their incentive is to be a stingy bastard by default.
This then puts a high bar on anything that is a cost, which mostly penalizes low expenditures counterintuitively. A line item of $200 is basically not worth fighting for. Something that costs $20000 is generally easier to justify in terms of effort even just subconsciously. Ultimately both line items take asymptotically the same effort to push through, but the larger one appears (at first sight) much more important. It may be that the $200 item is more valuable in the end of course.
