paydevs

And did you fix a problem you had yourself or was it a problem by someone else - esp. if you used a new programming language?

What do you mean by "practical aspects have become a huge burden"? Is it fixing bugs, adapting to changing environments, feature requests by user, communicating with your userbase, or something else?

If you are so keen on having disclaimers maybe you should also disclaim in which FAANG companies you worked and which SaaS Startup you are speaking for (as mentioned in your bio).

But open source libraries have a price point of zero - competing on a lower price would be negative. Other paid libs at least have a price that sustains the developer and/or company behind it.

Yes, thats my observation too. While sometime you find libraries that can be bought (e.g. ExtJS), there is no real market for libraries as everybody is used to use open-source, pay nothing, and adapt it to their needs.

But isn't this a little bit perverted system? We build a software app or library that has great value for other people and companies and we do not get paid for this but have to find ways around it to get something back. Imagine that would be the case with normal jobs - we go to work at Google without a salary and then have to find ways to pay the bills with helping other with SEO.

My hypothesis is that Open Source Software (Linux, OpenOffice, etc.) is a great gift because there isn't enough money to buy commercial software. However, open source libraries can be seen as a problem because today you can't easily build and sell libraries as everybody expects and uses open-source libraries.

Today, you have to build a bigger useful library, start a company around it, advertise, and sell it as a product - which is a big monetary investment. Starting with a small useful library and slowly receiving some money could help developers to get more interested in developing libraries - especially when young or living in low-wage countries.

Do you know of any statistics on the demographics of HackerNews? I hoped that it is not mainly focussed on the US.

The plan with PayDevs is to give maintainers a choice - it's their decision to monetize or not monetize their open-source libraries. Furthermore, the sourcecode still stays open - only the convenient access to build modules / compiled libraries will cost a dollar a month.

No, I just want to hear different opinions from different parts of the world. Just because we live in the western world with high salaries does not mean that this is the norm.

Btw. Stripe and PayPal also have subscriptions out-of-the-box but I'm not sure what ChargeBee offers more.

Furthermore, have a look at Paddle (https://www.paddle.com/) they cover the worldwide tax handling and have subscriptions (AFAIK they operate as a "middleman" and you only have to have a business relation with them and not your customers individually).

As for landing pages - there are platforms offering them such as Unbounce https://unbounce.com/landing-page-templates/ (even if a little bit pricey). Personally, I would integrate the landing page on your website / same domain - this will help you site with SEO.

And what is your problem discussing the topic? I have an opinion (like you) and I just want to know what other thinks of donations and if it works for them.

An did you try to monetize your project? And if so using which approaches? Donations, dual-licenses, paid support, etc.?

But in general you would if you had enough traction / income, right?

For a curated list of monetization approaches have a look at https://github.com/PayDevs/awesome-oss-monetization

Completely agree, no developer of an open-source software has explicitly stated that a) his software is open-source and b) that he adheres to OSI's definition.

Most developer just uploaded their project to GitHub and attached a license. If OSI defines some licenses as open-source or not is irrelevant. Legally only the license is binding.

Interesting, can you elaborate how a "premium user" pays if he wants to host the system by himself? Does he contact you directly or is there a payment system where he gets a code?

Can you tell which page you had the problem on? I only see links to bounties.network without the "www" subdomain (see https://github.com/PayDevs/awesome-oss-monetization/search?q...) and I couldn't find any link to inkscape - maybe you were on another list we referenced at the end?

I feel you that the current situation is not good, but nobody is forcing developers to share their projects as open-source or to use a license that is company-friendly. If the maintainer(s) do not want companies to profit from the OSS without giving back they could easily use a copyleft License (e.g., GPL) or switch to a closed-source approach.

And btw. it's not super easy for companies to contribute on a voluntary basis - their investors or stakeholders would not allow/like it. What they can do is declaring it as "donations" and paying it from the marketing budget.

Good idea. Looks like Paid Hosting similar to Elasticsearch, MongoDB, etc. that can later be converted into a Startup.

Btw. the benefit of a hosted version is not only that you do to not have to host it yourself, but also that the maintenance (updating, upgrading, scaling servers, backups, etc.) is done by the hoster.

There is not "one" community of OSS developers who either all want money or not. Some devs want to monetize / get something back and maybe work full-time on their OSS projects and others are totally against monetizing OSS.

From a current survey it looks like 41% of OSS developers want to monetize and 33% would like to work full-time [https://dev.to/joergrech/state-of-oss-monetization-2022-surv...]

So if you have a better approach to monetize OSS go for it.

The rules for "Show HN" mention that this kind of info / contribution is off-topic so we placed it in "Ask HN" to get more feedback and hopefully some additional ideas to monetize OSS.

Maybe we will post it on Show HN in the future if we have more approaches.