What alternatives do people have to monetize software in a more ethical way?
I particularly don’t understand the funding that some software receive. What they have to grant to receive those funds?
I also search for some type of monetization “model” better than donations, but more ethical than ads.
If it’s too much to explain I would be grateful for terms or books that I could search later.
I like paid cloud or sync features for apps that you can do it yourself as well. Like Zotero or some writing apps
Sounds a bit like Rustdesk. I’m happily hosting a relay on my VPS but the ‘account’ features don’t work for the free version. I just keep them in a note instead.
Cloud services or features monetization are interesting, I’ve seen some companies do a community or a local version and the business version with more features.
The slippery slope that projects taking this approach fall into boils down to ‘let’s put all our new features behind a business version and never add them to the community version until they become 2 totally different code bases’
What about a modular software, a base version and the modules are paid ? It would maybe avoid ramification? And the user would have more freedom.
What other examples? :)
I always imagined some sort of IP royalty, like you have an idea and implement it, then if someone build something over it for profit they need to pay a fixed percentage otherwise it would be free to use basically.