Qt is pushing hard for commercial licensing (which I heard prevents you from using the open-source version), putting L/GPL FUD on their websites, and trying to track users of their installers more.

EDIT: I've just realized that I want a revenue-limited trial, rather than a time-limited one. I basically want the Prosperity license, but with the ability to say "you have to pay me if your company makes more than $100k in annual revenue". Is there a license like that?

I've emailed the License Zero people, hopefully they'll do something for that.

The "that" in question was "copyleft if your project is open, pay us if your project isn't open". For that, try the AGPL or GPL, depending on your use case and customers, and then sell alternate licenses for people who don't want to make their own code open.

> Maybe the Prosperity license?

That isn't an open source license, despite its efforts to be ambiguous on that front. That and the even worse "commons clause" are exactly the kind of license that motivated the latter half of my original comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24005833

What's wrong with a license that's non-OSI "open" but gets developers paid from large companies to develop otherwise open software?

> The model of "copyleft if your project is open, pay us if your project isn't open" is one where I have no problems or concerns, and will happily use the open version and recommend that people building something proprietary purchase a paid license. Nor will I typically worry about the motives or future of the project unless I have some other reason to. And the KDE Free Qt Foundation means I never have to worry about Qt going proprietary.'

Software under a proprietary license is something I can't build other Open Source software atop of that I expect other developers to use and collaborate on. I don't want to have a forked ecosystem of proprietary-with-source-available software, I want to actually collaborate on Open Source software.

With Open Source, I'd feel confident that if we had to manage it ourselves, or fork it and add a patch, or get a third-party to develop a patch, or work with a dozen others with the same needs we have and collaborate on it, we can do so. It's reasonable to build an ecosystem or community or company around. You cannot replicate that with any non-open license; by the time you're done granting all the necessary rights, what you'd have is a non-standard-but-Open-Source license, at which point you'll get more traction if you use an existing well-established Open Source license.

I don't really care about encouraging the development of more proprietary software, whether or not it happens to have source available. There are already well-established models for getting people to pay for proprietary software. If someone is looking for a funding model for Open Source, and what they find is "turn it proprietary and generate FUD that it's as good as open", that's a failure. And when people are looking for Open Source and they find proprietary-with-source-available, it undermines decades of careful work and explanations by the FOSS community, and generates substantial confusion.

It's your software, and ultimately your choice how to license it. Various companies have tried the "source-available but still proprietary" model. Just please don't call it open or contribute to the FUD around proprietary-with-source-available licensing.

Speaking from experience, when encountering software under a proprietary-but-source-available license that tries to act like it's open, the response from companies that actually deal in Open Source is not "Ah, OK, let's pay them and use it", it's "yikes, get this away from us, how did this even end up in consideration, let's either use something Open Source or use something actually proprietary, not something by someone who is either confused about the difference or hopes other people will be". (The set of engineers and lawyers who deal with software licensing professionally, at various companies, tend to talk about it with each other.)

I develop multiple popular libraries that thousands of people use, yet I've never seen a single cent from them, which is fine for me because I don't develop them to make money. However, it's really hard to foster an ecosystem when companies who extract millions of dollars of value from FOSS don't feel like they need to give back.

Many ways of monetizing it don't misalign incentives. As a user, I don't value support less just because software is more reliable; on the contrary, I trust the software in higher-value contexts because it's reliable, and in those contexts I need the support more. I don't value "host this for me" less just because the software is easy to install and configure (because I still don't want to be the system administrator if I don't have to). And "please develop this feature for me" has great alignment of incentives.

> However, it's really hard to foster an ecosystem when companies who extract millions of dollars of value from FOSS don't feel like they need to give back.

You're a lot less likely to get paid for software that's under an all-permissive license (e.g. MIT or Apache or BSD). It's unfortunate that so much of the ecosystem has settled around permissive licenses; with such licenses, your best strategy for making money may be "use the software to get hired somewhere or to build reputation for consulting". There's a reason companies love permissive licensing, and subtly (or unsubtly) discourage copyleft. Strong copyleft gives you more options to monetize something, either now or in the future.

That said, I also do agree that there need to be more good ways of funding Open Source.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/

In general, its been my experience that the closed source enterprise only crap that most companies push for is exactly that: crap. I suspect its because those features are treated as a business expense, and thus built to keep costs low. Almost every time those features are underwhelming and buggy. If its OSS, at least I can contribute a patch; if the thing is popular, likely someone else has already fixed it.

Enterprise support is a fucking joke; they will delay delay and delay. If you push hard enough, they say "its on the roadmap" without giving any gurantee of when it will be fixed. The only time Enterprise support has really worked well is in my org that got the best support package for GCP. GCP's support for urgent issues and product feature requests has been somewhat reliable and predictable. Much more than literally any other enterprise (I'm looking at you Okta).

Can you give an example of a product feature request that succeeded via that support channel?

- we requested a way to prohibit the provision of ILBs on shared VPC subnets without explicit grants; GCP introduced a role for that

- we had issues with the number of compute instances being too high on our VPC and reaching limits because of the number of vpc peerings. In the past, every GKE cluster created a new peering. We have a bunch of GKE clusters, and as we added more the Max number of instances we could provision was reduced significantly. GCP introduced and fast tracked a feature that enabled all GKE clusters to use a single peering rather than create a peer per GKE cluster.

There’s a bunch more. But on this front I have been a happy customer.

Even for code listings I had at very least to buy the medium where they came.

I think there is a valid point you're making for smaller companies that are providing both open-source and commercial versions of software, but I don't think Nginx is a great example of that.

In the particular case of nginx, I can tell you their reputation is not great in adapting to the users’ needs.

But more abstractly, I don’t actually agree with that sentiment. I see more of a responsibility to give back in the form of patches and collaboration than throwing $ at the problem. I see the nginx approach of open source simply as a business tactic no different from Windows Home/Pro customer segmentation except Home is free for tactical reasons to kill off other competition. It is a calculated business move; if your business model sucks-—which it obviously did not in nginx case—-does not imply others are acting less than ethically or they should pay you out of pity. (That said it might be strategically important for them to keep your head above water and survive for their own benefit as their vendor, but that’d be a different angle.)

I suppose the difference between free software vs open source is also relevant to this discussion, and I could relate to your sentiment when facing the former much more than the latter.

implying that just because your open source project is being used, that it is entitled to fund the bills of the project maintainers.

I think patches and contributions are a form of bill paying.

(The above is assuming the concern that it is funding that’s a problem today; I don’t quite see it that way [for instance, I strongly suspect Nginx to have made more money than DBX so far, so who are we to say who’s been more successful; market cap ain’t everything], but that’s a hypothetical to think about.)

Moreover, supporting a project does not equate supporting its existing maintainers. It could mean taking some partial ownership including the review side and having some developers on your own payroll. Seems like that’s how the big project are done most of the time. The Open Core model we are focusing on is a niche and arguably more akin to fremium products than free software as a thing with communal ownership.

OSS is not a business model, but more closely matches charity and non-profits, and run on donations and altruism of their users.

i find it annoying that people here keep saying that a company _should_ pay for their open source software usage just because they have money to do so. They don't have an obligation. They could donate - and some do - but it is in no way required of them, regardless of how much value they derive from using said OSS.

Open-core projects, which has a somewhat useless core and a paid for 'enterprise' version is not, under my eyes, a proper OSS project, but instead is a way to market their proprietary product.

Linux via the ongoing lawsuit with BSD back then, and GCC because UNIX vendors started charging for their compilers, with GCC being the only alternative available.

However everyone needs to pay their bills, therefore the push for non-copyleft licenses, thus in a couple of years GPL based software will either be gone, or under dual licenses.

You already see this happening with BSD/MIT based alternatives to Linux on the IoT space, NuttX, RTOS, Azure RTOS, Zephyr, Google's Fuchsia, ARM's mbed, Arduino, ...

What on earth does this tirade even mean? Every business lives 'forcefully' and fights for survival. Sometimes it comes with values, i.e. we dont use child labour in DRK to mine thallium, fairtrade, organic, etc. OSS is one of those values.

Is there a business that lives 'effortlessly'?

Because then it is going to be a very thin selection available.

As chirchill once said: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."

Not all companies, of course; and to be clear, I think such a company structure is a problem itself and agree with you.

As for investing into opensource, Dropbox is trying to do that when possible, for example we (along with Automattic) did sponsor HTTP/2 development in Nginx.

- Open-Core::: Features are not added to core, as they want people to upgrade.

- Consulting::: Ease of use is ignored, as if it's too easy people won't need consultants.

- Sponsoring Goals::: Software is almost held at ransom, until goals are reached.

The best way to help open-source software is to donate or contribute code... if you're trying to maximise profits, then just make it propitiatory

Some problems can only be made so easy. Some problems require custom work. Sometimes you need paid support not because the product is low-quality but because you need to know that you can call someone at 3am because your service is down. There are lots of reasons to have consulting.

> - Sponsoring Goals::: Software is almost held at ransom, until goals are reached.

You're assuming the work would get done one way or another. Sometimes people have many other things they could be doing, and they need to justify spending more time on a project than they already do. Or sometimes, people have a fixed amount of time but they're happy to prioritize things people want and will pay for.

(No argument about open-core; that definitely has problems.)

Other great approaches include hosting the software as a service. Depending on the nature of a project, many people may want a service whose primary value proposition is "we'll host this for you so you don't have to maintain and administrate it".

Paid support surely is, as you say, about calling someone at 3am and having them look into an incident.

From my experience, that's not about helping you get the most out of the product, and a hand in tailoring it to your needs - that's the consulting part, and is usually paid for separately (and at much higher rates).

I totally disagree. Red Hat patches/maintains things regardless of whether people pay for it. Everything is always available open source. There are numerous derivatives of RHEL that get these for example.

The money you pay for Red Hat stuff is for support. There are always free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer alternatives of red hat products.

So much of what happens in sufficiently large organizations has nothing to do with profit maximization. Think confederacy of dunces, not a conspiracy of greedy evil geniuses.

I'm a bit confused by this - I work for HAProxy Technologies and we do have an enterprise product. Many of our customers contribute code directly into the community and we backport those features into the latest enterprise stable version. This means they do not have to wait until the next shipping cycle to take advantage of a new feature. There's also a large community & knowledge base around HAProxy.

Your reasoning may be right when dealing with "closed source enterprise software" but it doesn't line up when we start talking about open source/open core.

I don't know what their volume licensing is like, but at $2500/server list price, costs add up quickly.

If you buy something or worse you have to pay license fees on a regular base your earnings will be smaller.

We live in a world that is driven by economic growth so the ultimate goal is to maximize profit.

Of course this has a moral aspect to it as well and I see it but in this case I think it is not outraging enough to be something on the scale of a scandal.

Many businesses use ideas or products for free to start a successful enterprise that earns a lot of money.

We Germans are very risk adverse (i hate that sometimes)

Like selling tap water in bottles.

However, for profit companies are not here to do what’s “correct” they’re here to make money for its investors. If I had decision making abilities at Nginx I’d be conducting a comprehensive review of the free OSS offering and redacting the features and overall value with extreme prejudice.

Dropbox never paid because it COULD not pay. If you have an enterprise, paid version of your OSS product it has to be impossible for an enterprise to use it for free.

Why? Most enterprises, especially ones that aren't tech firms, are going to shell out for enterprise support even if there are no additional features. Crippling the community version doesn't necessarily help enterprise sales, it can reduce overall mindshare reducing enterprise traction or, worse yet, mean that a third-party downstream edition with richer open-source features becomes dominant and it's creator gets “your” enterprise support contracts.

i don't feel this to be true.

Also, an enterprise that's large would want some features that are irrelevant to a small shop. For example, single-sign-on integration with various providers.

Just think about the commercial success of SUSE Linux?

While partially true, this is overly reductive. Companies can and often do take actions that serve goals beyond "increase upcoming quarterly profits".

And besides, if that were to happen people would just go behind some other open source web server, and push that.

If the said company has unknown track record, then doing business with them is risky.

What if the company goes out of business in near future? Or get acquired (actually I think A lot of infra companies's end goal is to get acquired)? What if they raise the price out of sudden? How extensible/customizable their solution is?

The trust is the key here. If I am in the position to buy software from somewhere and cost isn't the primary concern, the money would goes to a known/stable figure in the industry.

Also if your going to china take a disposable phone and a laptop that is clean ands can be wiped on return.

Even if your SAAS was OSS, they could still deny you access as you're inhibiting their server, not your own.

Just look at the JS ecosystem. Everything is for free. But also shitloads of crap. A lot of libraries left unmaintained.

If you're going to sell software that has an OSS variant, make sure the commercial experience actually outshines the free one.

That said you'd be amazed at how much of man pages is written by Red Hat but isn't attributed, so nearly everybody on every distro benefits from our documentation without realizing it.

Also if I can ask, is your product also closed source (in any nature at all), but made with open source components?