Eric Raymond, although I've lost all respect for him as a human being over his bigotry, did write the watershed work on this topic, to wit, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (the book), for which we (sadly?) have no comparable works. In the essay therein entitled The Magic Cauldron, he addressed this exact problem, and suggested several solutions.
Some of those have proven fairly effective in my experience, looking at the industry:
Offering commercial licensing. You license the open source code under GPL or another restrictive free license. The Qt Company is one example of this. If your usage complies with the terms of the open source license, you can use it as such. If you cannot, you have to pay a license fee.
Free the source, sell the support. Canonical and Red Hat do this, and it works out well for them. Anyone can use Ubuntu or Fedora, but if you want their help with stuff, especially in a commercial setting, you pay them for that.
Free the source, sell the content. This works when you can make the source code open source, but the compiled version with the extra content costs money. Some games are like this.
Free the source, sell the service. This works when your tooling is free, but access to your servers, API, or what have you costs money.
As the CEO of xs:code - I totally agree with you :-)
I strongly believe that these models are the answer, so my team and I started the company to solve the OS sustainability and help developers monetize using these (and other) models.
Let's talk! xscode.com
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
Eric Raymond, although I've lost all respect for him as a human being over his bigotry, did write the watershed work on this topic, to wit, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (the book), for which we (sadly?) have no comparable works. In the essay therein entitled The Magic Cauldron, he addressed this exact problem, and suggested several solutions.
Some of those have proven fairly effective in my experience, looking at the industry:
Offering commercial licensing. You license the open source code under GPL or another restrictive free license. The Qt Company is one example of this. If your usage complies with the terms of the open source license, you can use it as such. If you cannot, you have to pay a license fee.
Free the source, sell the support. Canonical and Red Hat do this, and it works out well for them. Anyone can use Ubuntu or Fedora, but if you want their help with stuff, especially in a commercial setting, you pay them for that.
Free the source, sell the content. This works when you can make the source code open source, but the compiled version with the extra content costs money. Some games are like this.
Free the source, sell the service. This works when your tooling is free, but access to your servers, API, or what have you costs money.
As the CEO of xs:code - I totally agree with you :-)
I strongly believe that these models are the answer, so my team and I started the company to solve the OS sustainability and help developers monetize using these (and other) models.
Let's talk!
xscode.com