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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

What I could never get my head around when reading about free software is how can people, especially individuals or small companies make money making free software. Sure you can sell it but then the buyer is free to sell it for half the price.

One way is if the software is a marketing tool for selling something else. Then people sharing or using it is good for marketing the other service.

Another way is if the product is useless to the customer base in source form so they need to buy the compiled version, and aren’t technical enough to do it themselves.

But in general making software to sell needs a propitery license if you want to make money.

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Think about it in terms of the misv (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_ISV) business model instead of more mass market stuff. Your customers are paying you to install it, upgrade it, create backups, etc. They have no idea what to do with the source code and even if someone creates a setup wizard they have no idea how to setup all the other stuff they need. OSS provides a way for them to pool the development cost, customers and business avoid the bus factor and customers potentially get competition. Customers pay to have problems solved.

Of course these days this business model is being overtaken by SaaS and the bus takes out the developer and their data.

https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite

This software uses a license that seems to solve both the problem of ensuring the user has control over the software and also allowing the author to sell and distribute binaries without worrying (too much) about others undermining his control over the market.

It appears to work quite well in this case. Although I do not know how much he actually makes from software sales, it appears to be non-negligible based on its popularity within a niche community and the fact most users would rather pay $15 than learn the skills necessary to compile from source.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov....

GPL licensed, basically identical to the "non-pro" version, $5. I don't know how well that works out for them, but I think it is a model worth supporting.