The pragmatism of self-hosting is key parts of the software will be missing and you may not get a comparable experience.
The issue is not charging. The issue is where key, and actually core, functionality is sitting on the paid side. The idea that "at some point" you hit a paywall is generally not true. It can border on crippleware, and might as well be shareware (still great to support small development teams).
Evolving licensing and revenue generation is key.
The reality is we wouldn't have the world we have today without open-source software, as in the totally free kind, and at some point it does need to be maintained, unless some of the few packages reach some sort of maturity.
Your point about sysadmins not being cheap is fair. I would offer a counter-balance and ask how many more things than need to be are made to be far more complex than they need to be. After all, open-source is also a place of learning, experimentation, and breakthrough, and technical debt.
Still, other projects get so much done with so little support. Restricted core features pretty much tunes out a lot of users to get over the value inertia. It's hard to call it open-source, when it's not quite open source anymore.
One license I've seen is requiring companies over a certain revenue or headcount to have to license. Even JIRA had some of it figured out with their lowest license offering, but for a ton of functionality)
AGPL is helping with some of this - the more projects evolve to partner (for example if someone wants to license the tech to be part of an unrelated project)
Maybe the product managers should be the development team.
It's far easier to financially support fully open source software even though it might not happen as much as it should. I've recently come across an excellent loom alternative in Screenity and the developer only has a few sponsors.
Packaging open source for supporting the development of the software can come in many forms.
> It's far easier to financially support fully open source software even though it might not happen as much as it should.
Sorry for nitpicking, but this is the only thing you've said that I actually disagree with.
It is a hell of a fight to convince a company (or even worse, a non-profit) to pay for something that they could get for $0 by self-hosting. Symbolic, one-time gestures are possible to fight for, but a reocurring, significant amount is just not. If your open source project offers anything back in return for payment, it's a much easier sell to make. It doesn't have to be complicated or introduce a lot of overhead, it just has to be something, even it's like a very rarely relied on line of support or a logo on the homepage. Same goes for premium features, you just have to strike that right balance, which I believe we both fully agree on. Your tool has to be useful as a free, standalone product, at least up to a certain scale. I have my grudges about where that line gets drawn sometimes, but I can't hold a grudge about the exististence of such a line. It doesn't stop me from testing out your product.
It is of course a shame that we don't have to go through any of this for any fully proprietary product. It is what it is, it's just a question of whether it's worth the per-user price. There are tons of companies out there that have used an open source product for years, never paid a single dime, and then switched to a proprietary, very expensive solution.
There's also a lot of us disgruntled sysadmin/DevOps/SRE people along the way, but our powers are limited. Make it a little bit easier for us by charging for something we can't otherwise get from your free version. It's mutually beneficial for everyone involved: we do our best to give you some money (in return for something), sometimes we're succesful, and then that success usually contributes back to the fully open sourced version being better in some ways.
Individual donations are fine, I do them as well (less consistently than I'd like to; far from nothing), but convincing just one single company to pay up beats the hell out of 100 individuals. It's a fixed, agreed upon sum, usually guaranteed for a period of time by some type of a contract. There's also only one processing fee involved. It is always gonna be difficult to find that first one, but if you pull it off, the odds of your open source project "succeeding" (however you define success) increases dramatically.
The pragmatism of self-hosting is key parts of the software will be missing and you may not get a comparable experience.
The issue is not charging. The issue is where key, and actually core, functionality is sitting on the paid side. The idea that "at some point" you hit a paywall is generally not true. It can border on crippleware, and might as well be shareware (still great to support small development teams).
Evolving licensing and revenue generation is key.
The reality is we wouldn't have the world we have today without open-source software, as in the totally free kind, and at some point it does need to be maintained, unless some of the few packages reach some sort of maturity.
Your point about sysadmins not being cheap is fair. I would offer a counter-balance and ask how many more things than need to be are made to be far more complex than they need to be. After all, open-source is also a place of learning, experimentation, and breakthrough, and technical debt.
Still, other projects get so much done with so little support. Restricted core features pretty much tunes out a lot of users to get over the value inertia. It's hard to call it open-source, when it's not quite open source anymore.
One license I've seen is requiring companies over a certain revenue or headcount to have to license. Even JIRA had some of it figured out with their lowest license offering, but for a ton of functionality)
AGPL is helping with some of this - the more projects evolve to partner (for example if someone wants to license the tech to be part of an unrelated project)
Maybe the product managers should be the development team.
It's far easier to financially support fully open source software even though it might not happen as much as it should. I've recently come across an excellent loom alternative in Screenity and the developer only has a few sponsors.
Packaging open source for supporting the development of the software can come in many forms.