Among the thousands of open source projects, the ones championed as successful open source business make up a tiny proportion i.e. the <i>exception</i> not the norm.<p>Meanwhile the SaaS business model continues to eat the software market. A model that gives users less control than the desktop software model. And where the source code (built on open source) is not visible.<p>Open source software has been critical to the success of the SaaS model. You could argue SaaS is the true success of the 'open source business model'. Just not in the way open source advocates expected it to be.<p>There is another option - one that some open source advocates will immediately dislike: source-only products i.e. you sell your software product to customers to run them themselves. You give them the source code of your product so they can customise it to meet their needs. But the software is not open source and cannot be shared the way open source can.<p>There are successful source-only products. Two examples: Craft CMS and Kirby CMS. Both publish their source code on GitHub [1] [2] and rely on the honesty of their customers to pay (which they do). They have a thriving community of developers making plugins and extensions - proving that you can create a community of developers around a 'source-only' product.<p>[1] Craft CMS: <a href="https://github.com/craftcms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/craftcms</a><p>[2] Kirby: <a href="https://github.com/getkirby" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/getkirby</a>
I used to be a Copyleft zealot. But eventually I realized that an absolutist insistence on “Free as in Freedom” has become outdated: when the GNU project was started, it was not easy to distribute copies of large programs. That is no longer the case (you can now serve complete photo editors, IDEs, etc. over the web). The FSF thinks it’s OK to “sell” your program, but if it’s under a “true” FOSS license, how do you get compensated for the value your program provides to those who get their copies from the person/company who initially paid you? And what’s to prevent a group of people/companies from pooling their money and pretending there’s only one customer willing to pay for your product?<p>Zealotry makes it impossible to have a middle ground between “Four Freedoms” and “all rights reserved”, and insisting there’s only one true way to do FOSS will lead to 100% proprietary software dominating end-users (which is who the Four Freedoms were about in the first place).<p>I think an approach that preserves some of the Four Freedoms, while restricting distribution of the core program, would still be in agreement with the spirit of FOSS. For example, what’s wrong with a license that lets anyone study the program, modify it, etc. but empowers the Copyright owner to collect money from those who run it in production? If selling your program is OK, but modern technology makes it impossible to be compensated fairly by users of your software (and even worse, competitors with deep pockets can out-scale you and put you out of business), this seems like a reasonable middle ground.
Nice overview.<p>"Freemium is a harder model to implement in open source, since the source is, well, open, but we do see this in things like WordPress...."<p>=> Just to add another flavor: The Freemium model is working well for us even so we are <i>not</i> SaaS.<p>In our case, the main part of the RPA software is open-source (GPL) and free. All Internet access is only done within the open-source core.<p>The features of this core app can be extended by local native apps for Mac, Linux and Windows. These are proprietary/closed source.
I think dual licensing is possibly the best way to go, if your product mitigates a risk. It's why we went that way with browserless.io<p>Truth be told selling a small library probably isn't enough to make significant money on your product since it isn't solving a big enough risk. The risk of forking is fairly low, especially for small to mid sized companies. Larger companies, maybe so since things like security become much more urgent.<p>It's hard to separate people from their money, but I feel it becomes a lot easier if it offsets a potential risk they're not willing to take. Just my 2 cents.
See also <i>Selling Exceptions to the GNU GPL</i>: <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html</a>