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.
An interesting way that I don’t know of being implemented is a donation system where you donate to a feature request / issue and whoever implements / patches it gets it, and a “tax” so that some percentage of every donation can go to maintenance, server costs, etc.
I run my project from donations, sponsorships and paid support services. Am now more than covering my living costs, and forwarding a fair bit on to other open source projects (mainly project dependencies). I have a recent breakdown of finances here.
Divinci Code was great! Are you planning any new novels?
Thanks, that’s very useful, I noticed that the the donations are a in a low amount compared to the rest of the income, but it is more stable, if possible could you share your experience with the ko-fi platform and donations? Do you think it is an visibility problem, since it’s hard to break from dev sphere to mainstream?
In blender for example you receive prioritized support when you sponsor them.
There are also various rewards (like voting on features, exclusive access to discord channels, having a sponsorship section on the website that acts as something like an ad).
There are various guides for this. but that’s the shortened version.
Paid builds. You get Access to the source code but you can either build yourself or pay a small amount to have a packaged built and updated whenever.
I also like the twice a year nag screen thunderbird or Wikipedia uses (KDE was right to start doing it too, in my books).
I don’t believe a small donate button in the “about” section of the settings screen is of any use.
Some projects try to use a funding bar, that is shown to the user, when the funding is in risk the users know and donate more. The nag screen is effective, but if you are a donor already it can become somewhat annoying.
Opensource and free to use, paid business feautures (like single sign on, telemetry) and support.
Paid support.
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.
Good software is abstracted and free.
Applying it to a business effectively is where the money gets made ethically.
Contribute to the projects you use!
While I totally agree that this should be the case, I’m not sure it really works. Voluntary participation is among the first things to be cut when it comes to monetary gain maximization, and is often not even considered. And in some instances, like the publicly funded research institute I work at, there’s no funds dedicated to voluntary contribution to open source projects.
