You need to plug the bussines model to sourcecode, similar how you need to plug one to binary.

Unfortunately, give source is in a lot of ways give the MOST SIGNIFICANT VALUABLE OUTPUT a programmer do.

I'll say it again for future searchers of wisdom: Open Source is not a Business Model.

Saying 'it's not a business model' is basically equivalent to saying 'I don't have to worry about money.'

A business model is where you figure out who will give you money in exchange for value delivered. If you need money, you probably should think about that. And then you'll need to spend some time on execution of that plan.

I get that programmers just want to make things and have people use them. I feel that too. But pretending that "open source" is a business model is essentially just denying economic reality. It's the same thing when young artists grumble about having to earn a living somehow when they'd rather just be creating art.

People can definitely make a living with open-source software. But it doesn't happen by magic, any more than it does with closed-source software. It takes thought and work. That work is grubby and mundane and a bit banal, but it has to get done.

I have a ton of closed-source software in my projects folder. That's not a business model. Neither is open-source software, where I take some of that stuff and throw it up on GitHub.

A business model is where I repeatably create value for others and receive money in exchange. A modern software company can do that in a variety of ways, including selling training, documentation, support, custom features, consulting, services, and licensing.

Both open- and closed-source companies do that. They have business models. But open source on its own is not a business model, and neither is closed source.

And what's definitely not a business model is releasing something as open source and hoping that somebody gives me money. Businesses don't just happen. Somebody has to build them.

It is however a possibility.

I make some software. You like what it does and want to use it. I ask for money. If the price is right you give me cash and I give you an executable file.

How is that not a business model?

And what's definitely not a business model is releasing something as open source and hoping that somebody gives me money. Businesses don't just happen. Somebody has to build them.

I never claimed open source was a business model. I said the inability to easily monetize OSS is a limiting factor on its development because people need to eat and pay rent.

> I make some software. You like what it does and want to use it. I ask for money. If the price is right you give me cash and I give you an executable file. How is that not a business model?

That business model is selling executables that let your customers do some unspecified thing they care about. I have paid money to people who give me executables for both open- and closed-source software, so that description applies to both.

Making and releasing open-source software to the public, though, is not a business model. Which is why the Octave developer is struggling.

> I said the inability to easily monetize OSS is a limiting factor on its development because people need to eat and pay rent.

Right. But that's not specific to open-source software. Needing to eat, etc, is a limiting factor on making all software. And making almost anything else.

No, Sir. I think the point flew past you. Saying "it's not a business model" means that you need to worry about how to sustain yourself from the get-go if you want to go where ever pleases you, open or closed source.

The problem we have is that OSS creators don't realize, and often willfully ignore, the fact that nothing about opensource says you can't charge for delivering value to people. Sure, their ability to copy it themselves and do stuff might reduce your leverage, but I can almost promise you that a company which generates $10,000,000/year of revenue and relies on your software, will throw money at you if you ask. Especially if you say something like "You know, since you're not paying me for this, I can totally stop maintaining it at any point and then you'll be fucked because your business relies on this".

But many engineers don't like to be business people. So here we all are.

It's really not that hard: Do people's livelihoods and businesses rely on your work? Are you improving people's lives? Charge.

Doing it for fun and no interest in making a business? That's fine, but don't expect to make a living off of a thing you're not charging money for.

In a way OSS seems like the sort of thing that would have worked great in some hypothetical enlightened communist system that didn't suppress liberty.

Actually you got it wrong, it was precisely because AT&T could not legally charge the prices other vendors were selling their OSes, that UNIX got adopted by universities and small business, thus spreading its use in the industry.

The ones charging lots of money for UNIX clones were Sun, HP, Digital, HP, ...

I do remember, um, liberating an overlooked copy of system V/386 on 5.25" floppies that I found in a storage cupboard when I worked at PC Magazine in 1992 :-)

"A Narrative History of BSD by Dr. Kirk McKusick"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA

"Unix came into many CS departments largely because it was the only powerful interactive system that could run on the sort of hardware (PDP-11s) that universities could afford in the mid '70s. In addition, Unix itself was also very inexpensive. Since source code was provided, it was a system that could be shaped to the requirements of a particular installation."

http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/unixhist/chen.htm

Or as a famous talk once said: fuck you, pay me.

https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1

An extra $30k/year is pretty nice for a sidehustle I think. Mostly on track to do double that this year.

And of course, if a company asks for consulting, I charge. But I'm not focusing on consulting these days.

However a company is paying me to develop tech material for them as a content marketing strategy. At $600/article it's not a bad gig and I'm probably undercharging.

So .. uh .. the answer to your question is Yes, sortof.

You can read more about it here: https://swizec.com/blog/learned-6x-income-4-years/swizec/734...

IMO, the market may be acting rationally here. I have tried Octave several times, and always moved on with little regret. Genuine Matlab is tolerable for some prototyping tasks. A slow clone of Matlab has little value outside of academic environments where Matlab compatibility is required. Programmers use their favorite language, and others use a spreadsheet.

Also with copyright you are essentially dependent on people's willingness to pay.

Now digital distribution has upended the copyright model because you no longer need the resources of a publisher to distribute your work (good) but as creative work proliferates it's as hard as ever to polish and market it successfully and more difficult than it was to monetize (bad).

Of course it depends what you're doing. Some people make a fortune just yakking opinions into a webcam on YouTube or suchlike, and that's working out great for many many people. It's my bad luck that my tastes are a long way outside the mainstream and I'm not so brilliant that I can just crank out some commercial stuff on the side when I want cash.

It's a no brainer that giving away a product for free won't be a sustainable way to earn a living. It's not like there's a big mystery around how to make money off of software.

Essentially I'm proposing private-sector communism; let's find a way to raise money from people who depend on open source, and then find a reasonably good way for figuring out who to throw some at. It doesn't have to be perfectly proportional to the popularity of what they're doing, the goal is reduce financial insecurity rather than have a Great Accounting.

what is this problem?

Also there's a lot of friction if you're relying on your users to pull out their credit card info for such a small amount.

Like, I read a lot of news, and every news outlet I read would like me to subscribe. But while I do have couple of subscriptions, and if I was a bit better off I'd throw down for a few more, but if I were to buy a subscription to every outlet that I read 1 or more articles a month from then not only would it get expensive, it would generate an annoyingly large number of renewable transactions. I don't want 30 different subscriptions, especially when I might read a publication frequently for several months and then take a break from it for a similar period. I really like the journalism at The Atlantic for example but I haven't gone to their website for maybe 6 months; in this febrile political climate I've been reading more instant news and a bit less analysis/longitudinal work.

As you say I don't much care to pull out the credit card for a small amount, but I'll make smallish one-off purchases when I find something cool. What I'd like would be that I pay some fixed amount like $25/month and someone else takes care of distributing it approximately proportionate to where I spent my attention.

When book/magazine stores were more popular I used to buy a lot of magazines because I could go to one place and get a wide variety but not necessarily always the same ones every month. But it was only one or two financial transactions with a single vendor, the magazine store. This was more expensive than subscriptions, but more flexible plus I didn't get nearly as much junk mail. I hate marketing and when you buy magazine subscriptions you get swamped with it.

Unfortunately flattr didn't really take off.

So it is still not fixed.

These are solved. User adoption is a completely different issue that applies to almost all donation systems. Even if nobody uses X, it doesn't mean X doesn't exits.