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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

You entirely miss the point of open source.

Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it.

"Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the founding of the Open Source Initiative, succeeding the free software movement initiated in the 1980s, with the intention of overcoming the ambiguity of the word "free" — meaning both freedom and gratis — to better appeal to the business world."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

You seem to be caught up in the 'free' part of 'free software'. It does not mean 'gratis software'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

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I know what it means. The problem is that people are expecting to be paid after they've already released it to the public for free.

You can make it work. Odoo is making money selling services, and there are many businesses making money re-selling Odoo in one form or another: partially rebranding, SaaS, support...

A non negligible amount of FOSS follows a similar path: yes, they are OSS, but if you really need it, you'll be better served paying a fee to someone who knows how to make it work properly.

That's a different business model from trying to sell the software itself. Plenty of consultants make a living doing integration work. They don't claim to be in the business of selling FOSS software, though.

Another model is selling an enterprise-grade release that builds atop the FOSS version, but with closed-source features and support. This is the model that nginx (now F5) and haproxy use.

I think a small issue with foss and monetization is that you can accept money for said software hell even release it with expectations that you have to pay for it, but you can't insert a clause in the license that stipulates that the foss rights only applies to paying or paid customers.

Thus there is no legal protection you really got if you go foss as a developer when it comes to ensuring fair compensation.

There is plenty of legal protection: copyright law so far held up pretty well. With the AI laundromat in play it's a completely different story though.

I meant when it comes to ensuring you as a non paying user can circumvent said restriction as that restriction goes against foss license.

Is there any well known, successful FOSS that isn't also free as in gratis?

I understand the distinction but have literally never encountered it in practice.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is almost that. Technically they can't lock it all down, but they play tricks so that's practically the case.

Companies pay for support, CentOS reason to be was people wanted Red-Hat work putting out a great distro, while not wanting to pay for it.

Also very few software can be sold only on having support, regular users don't care about support.

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