What alternatives do people have to monetize software in a more ethical way?
I particularly don't understand the funding that some software receive. What they have to grant to receive those funds?
I also search for some type of monetization "model" better than donations, but more ethical than ads.
If it's too much to explain I would be grateful for terms or books that I could search later.
I like paid cloud or sync features for apps that you can do it yourself as well. Like Zotero or some writing apps
Cloud services or features monetization are interesting, I've seen some companies do a community or a local version and the business version with more features.
The slippery slope that projects taking this approach fall into boils down to 'let's put all our new features behind a business version and never add them to the community version until they become 2 totally different code bases'
What about a modular software, a base version and the modules are paid ? It would maybe avoid ramification? And the user would have more freedom.
What other examples? :)
I always imagined some sort of IP royalty, like you have an idea and implement it, then if someone build something over it for profit they need to pay a fixed percentage otherwise it would be free to use basically.
Sounds a bit like Rustdesk. I'm happily hosting a relay on my VPS but the 'account' features don't work for the free version. I just keep them in a note instead.