I couldn't find anyone who could help us do something like run a small business or just help us figure out how to sell those useless stooge licenses I keep hearing companies want to buy instead of sending donations.
I had no idea what I was doing. I found a local lawyer who incorporated me for $1000. He wrote the commercial license for my software for another $750. I had a friend who was a CPA and taught me how to keep books. I was terrified but literally every business is started this way.
Need help? Walk outside your house and ask the five nearest businesses who they use for legal and accounting. Talk to a professional.
I'm also happy to chat about starting an OSS business during my weekly happy hour, all welcome:
One possibility: Find a company that buys a ton of Matlab licences in order to get access to a specific library. Implement that library well, GPLed, for a price that is below their annual license cost.
It's a tiny niche (big company, small library), but if it can be found, it is one the Octave team could do well. Everyone, except Mathworks, would win.
Proprietary libraries do offer sponsoring companies greater competitive advantage, but the first mover to a cost savings is already a winner.
Getting a long list of big Matlab customers is a place to start. Sometimes they boast about the biggest fish in advertisements.
If running out of money is a critical problem for Octave development, make finding GPL revenue the core goal. Octave is now complete and capable enough that it can take care of itself for a year with bugfixes alone.
The first possibility has been attempted. In effect, that's partly why the GUI happened: a company really wanted it and paid for its development. jwe has been able to coast on this kind of gig for a while, about 8 years now. It's just that it's never been a very financially stable thing.
The rest of your suggestion seems to be about running a business. That's the thing we've just never really known how to do. There are a lot of business details that we've never really figured out because we'd rather be writing code.
the nice thing is that octave is established enough that you won't need to do a lot of marketing to develop awareness of the product, which is usually the hard part. you also have some validation for your product (a large and successful competitor and a bunch of support contracts for octave). it sounds like, instead, the hard part for you is figuring out what you want to sell and getting going. people seem willing to help, so take them up on the offer! i'm also happy to lend an ear or a hand if need be. good luck!
Every project has to determine their own path to sustainability. Knowing only what I've read here, I'd sell support in seat packs, e.g. $1000/yr for every 250 users. A good sized university might have 1000 engineering students and $4000/yr for a critical tool used by all their classes seems reasonable.
The great thing is that you define support however you want. 24/7 phone? Email during business hours only? Just make it clear to the customer so expectations are properly set.
A business might only have 10 people that use a tool like Octave but $1000/yr isn't a big deal if that tool is necessary for their daily work.
Still, the money from what you call "useless" licenses is minimal compared to the one that the businesses are ready to pay if they don't have any other alternative but to pay. Business are the systems that are designed to make profit. If they don't have to pay, they typically won't.
The key thing after that is to separate your income and expenses into personal and company. Never mix funds. Get a separate company credit card. You'll probably have to start out using the LLC's bank debit card - that's fine.
I can only speak for me: Because I did not pay anything for the foundation I built on. If someone comes and asks for a cut (and I had this more than once), I give it to them: A fair share for their 3-line patch to a million LOC codebase, minus my fee for reviewing, for tutoring and for project management. Unfortunately, so far, nobody paid after I sent my invoice :(
Just doing one thing all your life is not an excuse for not taking care of yourself. Developers know how to brush their teeth and feed themselves, and they know how to navigate really complex abstractions, they can certainly learn the basics of incorporation and contracts.
Using your analogy: to some (and I include myself), telling them "just start a business", is like telling your grandmother to post a question on stackoverflow when she can't figure out which little picture to click to open the word processor.
You have to understand that some things that from your point of view are easy, are hard for other people. Starting a business is NOT "brushing your teeth." There's basic "taking care of yourself," and then there's how to create a self-sufficient semi-profitable business to work on projects you enjoy. I don't see how you can make this false equivalence.
The point isn't to start the most successful company ever its to just be able to function and do what you want to do (programming). By your analogy your grandma is willing to navigate a confusing and dissorienting world to get what she wants (probably facetime with her family) but you are just going to sit around waiting for someone else to hand you what you want without any effort on your part to learn something new?
You dont need partners, you just need a business checking account and an LLC so you can invoice companies. I recommend waveapps for creating and managing invoices btw.
Sorry if my tone is a little tough but I read so many defeatist comments in this thread and it depresses me that so many smart individuals willing to do so much good for the world arent willing to invest some of their talents (like relentless google searching and asking questions on forums) in taking care of themselves.
Two things though:
* Developers, in general, are not business people. This may be different in Silicon Valley, but in a lot of the world, programmers have spent their life concentrating on one thing, learning to program. That doesn't mean they don't just "not know how" to start a business and find clients. It means they don't even know how to do the basic, first steps to registering one, knowing what to charge, etc. Let alone the complications of supporting an open source model on top of the usual business things like tax. It is just easier to throw up a paypal link and be done with it. Yes, something should be done about this, but there you go.
* When people pay for things, suddenly they expect it to .. work. As in, be stable. And be supported. And be kept up to date. All of a sudden you go from being able to work on your favorite project to supporting clients and responding to their needs. Many programmers don't want this. Admittedly, if you're floating such a project as your main income, perhaps you should be considering these kinds of things, but on the other hand one thing that keeps an FOSS project going, and gives it advantages, is not having to worry about exactly these things. It also might have a huge disincentivising effect towards contributions; why would contributor contribute if they don't get a cut? There are specific challenges in business-oriented FOSS funding models that would need to be addressed.