How are companies or developers supposed to make a full time living with OSI opensourced projects? (opensource.org)

submitted 4 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren't OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also been targets of vitriol.

So, let's say we wanted to make it possible for the majority of developers to work on software that strictly follows the definition of opensource, which models would be acceptable to make enough money to work on those projects full-time?

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[-] Deckweiss@lemmy.world 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Personally I like the following two approaches:

Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)
Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)

I think those approaches are fully compatible with the open source definition, but please correct me if I am wrong. (The examples I mentioned are just some of which I personally know and use, but of course they are many others)

[-] pedroapero@lemmy.ml 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I would add:

Paid 24/7 support
Pay for custom features
Accept donations

[-] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 months ago

Also paid integrations into your existing environment.

[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago

Proxmox does this.

Syncthing has vendor support - they use ST in integrations.

Both seem like effective models

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 2 points 4 months ago

Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)

Do you believe anything should be done if a large competitor takes over the business of hosting for other companies and hosting is the major revenue stream of the opensource project?

Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)

That sounds like Open Core and I am for this, but there seems to be a dissatisfaction within the loud part of the opensource community regarding it. They don't consider it "open-source". Do you still count it as opensource?

Your proposals concern services or applications. Do you have any thoughts on opensource that isn't that e.g libraries, frameworks, protocols, and so on?

Anti Commercial-AI license