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No offense, but it's hard to monetize FOSS operating systems. I've yet to see a scalable business model. All FOSS OS's rely on either donations or consulting/su
by waplot 5y ago
No offense, but it's hard to monetize FOSS operating systems.
I've yet to see a scalable business model.
All FOSS OS's rely on either donations or consulting/support for revenue.
There's just no money to be made there, unless someone comes up with something innovative.
- ununoctium87 5y agoRedHat?
- dwohnitmok 5y agoMy impression is that RedHat is basically the only company to pull off the open source + paid support model. All other open source companies I know of either use open core or paid hosting. Are there are any other companies like RedHat successfully thriving off just paid support? If so which ones? If not why not?
- yyyk2 5y agoSUSE is another one I'm aware of. Some projects also fund themselves off support, I believe cURL does it.
- dwohnitmok 5y agoRight I totally forgot about SUSE. But I'm not really counting cURL because that's just one person right? The challenges faced by essentially a 1-person freelancer are quite different than a larger company. Or is cURL now a whole company at this point? EDIT: I see you mean this as a separate category of just "projects."
- andrey_utkin 5y agoThe curl guy has joined a company. https://curl.se/support.html https://curl.se/support.html
- blaser-waffle 5y agoArguably that's mostly cuz SAP strongly recommends SuSE Never seen a real use case for it outside of the ERP arena, and RHEL / CentOS can do everything else. Ubuntu / Canonical is trying but heard the company is kind of a mess.
- mattip 5y agoPostgreSQL has a number of companies providing support, the db is free and open source. Ray is offered for free, Anyscale provides support. Quansight offers qhub for free and provides support. Those are just a few off the top of my head. Disclaimer: I work at Quansight and contribute to ray.
- dwohnitmok 5y agoAnyscale seems to follow the paid hosting (open source product + paid in-house SaaS offering) strategy though? Similarly the majority of the companies listed at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/ https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/ either provide paid hosting or some version of open core (proprietary add-ons/tools) in addition to support, or else seem to be general DB consultancies that include Postgres as one of their supported products, although it does look like there are a few small teams that focus exclusively on Postgres consulting. Quansight is a fascinating example! Are you allowed to share roughly what ratio of revenue comes from the support side and what ratio comes from the venture fund?
- mattip 5y agoI don’t really know, sorry. There are a lot of moving pieces as the company grows (we are hiring) and the interplay between the pure consulting, open source work, growing the Venture fund is dynamic.
- noogle 5y agoWhat's wrong with paid hosting? For the people who do pay for software (essentially commercial entities), the management and support are as important (if not more) than the software itself. The code being open-source is actually a great advantage because it alleviates concerns around lock-in and vendor going under (If e.g. AWS's RDS is for some reason no longer available to us, I can still run Postgresql myself, at least until I find an alternative).
- dwohnitmok 5y ago> What's wrong with paid hosting? Oh nothing wrong. I'm just on a fact-finding mission on seeing whether any other companies have successfully followed the consulting/support contract model vs paid hosting or open core (because this has rather significant repercussions on what kind of products lend themselves well to a given business model, e.g. a desktop app is not going to work well for paid hosting).
- nix23 5y agoSuse, EnterpriseDB, Canonical, Hashicorp and and and...but a Linux-distro for the desktop with the sustainability of two "fighting" friends......
- dwohnitmok 5y agoIIRC EnterpriseDB mainly makes it money from paid hosting and I think Hashicorp makes its money from a combo of paid hosting and open core (i.e. it has other proprietary tools and add-ons). SUSE is a good example, but I'm not as sure about Canonical. Wasn't it the case that Canonical is actually operating at a loss and has been for a while? Maybe that's changed?
- tssva 5y agoCanonical had a $20 million operating profit in 2020.
- dwohnitmok 5y agoOh interesting. But digging into that it looks like it's coming from adding open core and previous to that they were losing money? (Ubuntu Pro + Ubuntu Advantage providing auxiliary proprietary? tools)
- nix23 5y agoBut then you can argue that RedHat made also money with Openshift no? >EnterpriseDB mainly makes it money from paid hosting Not sure if that's true.
- dwohnitmok 5y ago> But then you can argue that RedHat made also money with Openshift no? Yeah but RedHat's (and I guess SUSE?) miracle is that they were still very profitable before Openshift. > Not sure if that's true. Well hopefully someone from EnterpriseDB can chime in!
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoThe thing is if you do pull off the open source + paid support model where does that leave you? Doing technical support? I suspect most of us would prefer to spend our time creating rather than answering emails and phone calls. It feels like we have the cart before the horse, we start by deciding we want to do open source then try and squeeze the business model into it. We would be better starting with the business and customers then deciding whether open source helps or hinders.
- tlamponi 5y agoProxmox projects (Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup, Proxmox Mail Gateway) are also 100% fully open source and gets the revenue through enterprise support. Works fine for us.
- nix23 5y ago>Works fine for us. Because proxmox makes phenomenal products.
- moltke 5y agoMy understanding is that Busybox and buildroot are largely maintained by individual consultants which is pretty similar (although there's no larger company around them.)
- oblio 5y agoThe company bought by IBM recently? I mean, they got a nice chunk of change, but there's no guarantee that any of their original culture will still be in place 10 years from now.
- bodge5000 5y agoAlways thought that Aesprite were onto something good. Assuming I've got this right, the source code is out there and free, but you need to pay for the compiled binaries. Most people can't be bothered doing the latter, so paying a bit for it is worthwhile
- badsectoracula 5y agoNote that Aseprite is source-available but not FOSS, the license explicitly forbids redistribution. It used to be FOSS at the past though.
- torginus 5y agoI'm not sure Aseprite is an example to follow - just as they made this license change, a fork of the previous license - LibreSprite - has popped up. It lacks a lot of the features and bugfixes of Aseprite, but hey it's free, and many open source enthusiasts view it as the morally superior version. This simultaneously shows the weakness of the open-source development model - a non-monetizable passion project can rarely match the quality of something with full-time devs behind it, and probably isn't something that the Aseprite dev(s) are happy about - it sucks to compete against your own product sold for $0.
- waplot 5y agoI've seen the pay-for-binaries model in a few places. Not sure if it's scalable since someone can write a build script and share it with the community.
- gmemstr 5y agoIt depends -- with a community build script, you're relying on (and trusting!) a third party to maintain it and not do anything malicious. Much easier to pay a few bucks for first party binaries. At least in my eyes.
- Gigachad 5y agoThis is how every distro repo works and likely where you would get that binary from.
- brightball 5y agoAgreed. This is the whole reason I started using PopOS…because it has System76 behind it with a clear funding strategy.
- entropie 5y agoI found nabu casa, the maker of homeassistant a good approach. You can pay 5 bucks/month to have a no-worry about cloud access to your instance.
- throwaway48375 5y agoCloud access sounds like an anti-feature to me.
- sergiomattei 5y agoIt sounds like an excellent feature to me. I’d pay for that. I’d say they’re charging too little.
- Inversechi 5y agoThey upped their pricing to 6.5 USD last month. Aside from the friction-less remote access they also provide friction-less Google/Alexa integration. It's documented how to set this up yourself if you don't wanna pay them to manage it for you too.
- cmsj 5y ago> It's documented how to set this up yourself if you don't wanna pay them to manage it for you too. That right there is the best way to go. Everything in the open, everything can be self-hosted, but you can pay for the convenience of someone else doing it.
- Semaphor 5y agoI’d normally have done that myself. But considering that having them handle it also funds Home Assistant development, it was actually pretty easy to decide for.
- BostonEnginerd 5y agoTheir solution is to act as a proxy between your HomeAssistant installation at home and the public internet. Supposedly the SSL certificate sits on your device and they have no access to your data. I think this is the right way to do it
- actionfromafar 5y agoBut ElementaryOS is in a unique position to monetize which they don't use. They don't allow commercial applications on their app store. I'd publish there in a heartbeat, if they did. They are also in the position they (barely) function at a very low cost. They don't need a lot of cash flow to make a huge difference. If someone has a way in with them, please please mention this. I'd hate for ElementaryOS to die, I really like it and have followed it from the beginning. It's the only Linux which strikes the balance between being "normal" and caring about simplicity, consistency and ease of use.
- realusername 5y agoIt's more than that, they only allow open source apps AND built with GTK. I also use elementary daily and I cannot publish my own app in their store
- badsectoracula 5y agoWell, the Gtk part makes sense since they want to provide a consistent UI. The weird bit is that it must be hosted on Github. https://docs.elementary.io/develop/appcenter/publishing-requirements https://docs.elementary.io/develop/appcenter/publishing-requ...
- actionfromafar 5y agoI forgot to mention - the user can pay $0 for any app. This is the problem which needs to be fixed. All apps are donationware, enforced by the appstore.
- mrlemke 5y agoThis is exactly why I never bothered. Combine that with the fact users can pay $0 and then come to GitHub to complain (i.e. create a support burden), I figured it wasn't the best option for a solo developer to build a business model on. It would be more interesting if there was more flexibility in the monetization. Options for a minimum price + pay more per seat (for integration with some corporate provisioning software), subscription pricing, one time price + either support subscription or support "piecework" (like bug bounties or developer consultation), and invoicing integration.
- moltke 5y agoI thought Redhat did a great job monetizing Linux. Commercial OSes like QNX work essentially the same way.