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Comment by irishcoffee | Hacker News Reader

Instead of being dishearted, propose a solution to enable the ability to make a living. First thing that popped into my head was some sort of support model. CentOS vs RHEL. Give the farm away for free but consult how to run the farm...

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Your farm has to be complex enough to need help using it. You either have to make an absolutely massive farm or intentionally make it hard to use/maintain.

You would think that at least one big company finds it in their interest to make sure the product is bug-free, at least enough to compensate core FOSS devs for their time.

It's a problem similar to the tragedy of the commons - why should I pay for something when company X, my competitor to boot, would not only benefit but clearly has more money/uses the software more/whatever other reason I feel justifies washing my hands of it.

The history of Openssl bugs before Heartbleed is at least one counter example.

Yes this is one of the two obvious potential solutions for that particular project (the other being a hosting service) but transitioning from open source project to open source company can be challenging!

@irishcoffee: “Instead of being dishearted, propose a solution to enable the ability to make a living. First thing that popped into my head was some sort of support model. CentOS vs RHEL. Give the farm away for free but consult how to run the farm...”

Seems perfectly reasonable to me, who down voted this and why?

Because it's so trite and obvious.. Oh really, support, geez why didn't I think of that? This discussion has been going on for 20+ years and the conclusion is simple: OS is not a viable business model in the vast majority of cases, and certainly not for those who only want to sit in their basements coding. Want to make money from software? Charge for it.

I think the vast majority of people who want to make money building software don't start off by finishing a product and then trying to sell it. A much more common scenario is building software for someone from the start (or building a service, but let's focus on "pure software" for now). In that case the developers are paid for time spent, not copies licenced, so using a FLOSS licence isn't a roadblock for making money.

If you're building software for someone & being paid your time for it, you typically don't get to license it & release it as open source.

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