Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

Re:Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on L... by wendy0x2 on Monday July 23, 2018 @03:41PM (#17595334)

A company can't survive on paid oss (gnu/gpl). The license allows anyone to purchase it and then go ahead and give it out for free, which would happen in short order.

Support doesn't work for many small companies, because you just don't have the manpower, so proprietary software is necessary.

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Re:Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on L... by mattl on Monday July 23, 2018 @04:59PM (#17595938)

I don’t think a business would actually do that, if they purchased something they would likely not put it up on GitHub immediately, but I think the key to selling free software is customization. Red Hat makes a good deal of money from free software, but as you say, much of that is from support.

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Re:Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on L... by jodrellblank on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @12:32AM (#17598131)

It's almost like 2.9 billion dollars of annual revenue incentivises RedHat to make worse software, to encourage people to buy support.

Hah, what am I saying, ignoring incentives like that is easy and commonplace, I'm sure they pay it no mind at all.

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Re:Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on L... by gsich on Monday July 23, 2018 @05:47PM (#17596303)

Also, many "small" programs don't require support because they are very simple to use.

You can probably make money by selling Windows binaries of OSS software. See ntopng, where compiling on Windows is not that straight forward as compared to Linux.

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Re:Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on L... by antt on Monday July 23, 2018 @06:14PM (#17596464)

Most companies don't survive on selling software anymore either. Look at Adobe. You can't buy their products, you just rent them.

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