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#free#software#source#open#money#pay#don#foss#app#paid
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Discussion (95 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it.
"Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the founding of the Open Source Initiative, succeeding the free software movement initiated in the 1980s, with the intention of overcoming the ambiguity of the word "free" — meaning both freedom and gratis — to better appeal to the business world."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
You seem to be caught up in the 'free' part of 'free software'. It does not mean 'gratis software'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
If you found one willing buyer while it was still closed source, odds are there are others. Why rob yourself of additional income? Open sourcing does happen from closed source, but usually that's long after the income stream has exhausted itself (see, e.g., https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos).
I'd argue the best possible model for goods that have no marginal costs (aka IP) is the "pay me to create it" model.
As in, let a creator decide how much they value creating the work. Then pay them that to create it - then release it free for everyone.
---
No ridiculous societal restraints that cost time and money to enforce (poorly) as IP law. Compensation is happening. Creating is encouraged.
Practical constraints make it unlikely we'll get much closer to this than Kickstarter (and equivalents) but it's a very honest model, that works with intellectual property by default.
Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
The open sourcing of Netscape 5.0 happened in early 1998, and AOL purchased Netscape later that year. Firebird/Firefox came a few years later.
Second, it depends on what you define as success and failure. Netscape made its pre-IPO shareholders money if they timed their stock sales right. But the stock didn't go up because the company was profitable. It went up along with every other dot-com stock until the 2000-2002 crash, based on hopes and dreams, not fundamentals. The company never turned anywhere near close to a profit.
To me, a successful company is one that makes a sustainable profit based on its business fundamentals, not one that makes its founders and early investors rich in an investment bubble.
[1] Correction: Netscape did charge for the browser if used in a commercial context, but few people actually paid up.
This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because
1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free",
and
2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.
Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them.
No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated.
So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0.
Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.
That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
For example Krita. https://krita.org/en/download/ FOSS but you can buy it on Steam, Microsoft Store, Epic Store, and Apple Store. You get one exclusive feature, automatic updates (and more recently Steam Cloud sync support), and you also support the developers (on the other hand Valve, MS, Epic, and Apple also gets a cut too).
If you read for example the Steam reviews everyone points out that it's a free software but buying on Steam is also a good and very importantly straightforward way to support the devs + the platform itself has such a pull ("buying games you never play") that people buy it just for the case of having it in their library
https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita
When Apple moved to ARM, the App Store version lagged behind. An ARM version was available, but not in the App Store. I assume this is because that ARM version was a separate download instead of being a universal app, and the x86 app would run on everything (for now).
The app is no longer open source, and is paid. To get the ARM version (due to my stubbornness in not wanting to install Rosetta), I had to pay again just to get the app through a different means of distribution.
Too many run-ins with silly issues like this can really sour a person on the “free app in a paid store” model.
If you're happy to sponsor the app's development, then owning the App Store version should make you feel proud. The developer is still able to make a living thanks to you, and they're offering extended support if you're unwilling to use a fork of the free version. A good example of this is Dwarf Fortress, which I have bought on Steam 3 times now so that I could gift it to two of my friends. God willing, nothing will prevent me from buying a 4th and 5th copy when Christmas rolls around.
That said, I tend to trust all closed-source software significantly less, even if it's given away for free. Especially is it's given away for free.
https://github.com/utmapp/UTM
That's a lot of purchases imo for a project like this. I'm kind of ambivalent about the store cuts but they give a huge enough exposure to any game or software.
Affordable binaries and SASS are fine options that I’d like to see
This article is full of LLMisms, which is to be expected but maybe it wouldn't be 5000 words and wouldn't need this disclaimer if they wrote it themselves
From my perspective the piece was well structured, paced and thought through (and yes, a bit long)
Maybe the llms are getting better, but either way, this article reads like a real hunan write the whole thing.
"and I don't think that's right, and the distinction matters" Yeah right. lol
It's not only not 'worse than the LLM prose', it's a community service!
If everybody would just agree to start their open source code as something like source-available or OpenRAIL -requiring companies with more than $5M in annual revenue to pay for the work - we wouldn't be in this situation.
https://fair.io/
Also, the initial software probably didn’t have a lot of known cves when it was sold.
The theory is great, but I'm unsure how you execute this.
> Ruby Central, whose dependence on one big sponsor then produced the 2025 takeover
Ruby Central had two major sponsors at the time: Alpha Omega and Shopify. Also the events had much more to do with interpersonal conflicts than sponsors.
My report: https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-fracture-incident-repo...
That is the GitHub only portion, but the AWS root happened immediately after/during and has its own timeline https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-ev...
> a depleted team
The named people we lost from the report: Sam was already way out the door. Andre was most of the way. Ellen wasn't doing that operational work. Deivid was only working on bundler and not the registry. Josef is the main operational loss, he removed himself. I'm unsure of which attack exactly Is being referenced, but Colby was promoted to full time (was planned before, just waiting on paperwork).
Other prior maintainers and security researchers did NOT leave. Maciej Mensfeld Was especially crucial. Jenny Shen. To name a few. These people are “the maintainers” too. We’ve (I’m a volunteer, came on in October 2025) brought on a number of in-kind engineers as well (companies donating engineer hours via letting employees work on company time).
I reached out to everyone unnamed that lost GitHub access. Of them, one asked for admin back (granted). None were active in operations.
Seldo’s overall point: about the fragility of all of this still stands. But I also believe the details and the nuance matter. I reached out to Laurie on bsky when this was first published but didn’t hear back.
Maintaining a popular registry is very hard work, hard enough that commercial entities would rather pay than having to do it themselves. It is literally SaaS. It could absolutely be monetized for the common good - although the gamification worry is real, and the governance would be really difficult to defend from sharks. But there might be clever ways to fix those issues.
The one thing you cannot fix is the cross-planet level playing field that registries provide. Today, a small African company can pull from a registry more or less in the same way as large US corporations. If you put a toll booth up, the toll will soon be too high for people in various parts of the world.
I'm not reading an AI slop article, but there's nothing in either the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition restricting the selling of software. It does prevent you from restricting people from sharing that software once they've bought it, but you could always use a threshold pledge system to ensure you get enough money before releasing anything:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
As I understand it, if you have the first, the second follows from it. So it's effectively the same.
Leaving a tip, paying for something free, trying to send money to a group that our infrastructure absolutely relies on - stupid hard. Commercial support, on the other hand, is very understandable to the bean counters.
Linux (GPLv2) seems like an obvious counterexample?
If there isn't an even more generous option is simply because building a mainstream OS is incredibly hard.
On the other side of things, does accepting a PR from someone grant the author the ability to collect royalties for that software project? If so, how would you quantify that? LOC seems like a quick but really bad answer for what it is incentivizing.
For many, the entire point of "F" in "FOSS" is not getting tangled up in this kind of mess. I personally would never want to add "am I opening myself up to a lawsuit if I don't pay someone for their PR" to enter my calculus of accepting a PR. Especially if this is because I reject payment at all on a project.
Finally, if a company/employee submits code to FOSS under this model, do they now expect a return?
I kind of like the incentives created by this competition. This "what if someone takes your software, adds one feature, and sells it" argument has been made many times and I think the answer is that you, as the original maintainer, are in the best position to add features and if you squander that position you deserve to lose.
Depending on how you count, in my research group we are like 10 and in my whoooole university we are like 60.000 employees. When they went from free to restriced for big organizations I just uninstaled it.
If pypi started charging too, you'd have nowhere else to go.
Digital goods live in a post-scarsity situation. Applying the same business model as real life products is crazy and it's the reason why we have Adobe&Co.
It's easy. Everyone knows the deal going in, and if somehow you missed that you're not going to get paid for this and you want out at any time -- you just stop.
If you made something of value someone else who cares enough will pick it up. Or it can languish and the earth will keep spinning. It's fine.
[0] https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep... [1] https://happort.org/constraining_freedom
Conditionally free is also free.
I'm sure AI can also brainstorm more ideas for (F)OSS business models today
If the corporates want to use it, they can make a licensing agreement and put money into a trust of all who support it.
They don't want to pay? Too fucking bad.
In fact, often they don't even want money to be a thing at all, they think capitalism is inherently evil (cough innovation) and would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something.
Sorry... I like the world to be a little more interesting than that.
These are the currencies of the VC world, and many open source developers don't release their work for those reasons (myself included, limited though my contributions are). It seems strange to deride them as making the world uninteresting because of this.
Maybe there’s a balance to be struck.
Modern society has done a wonderful job proving that sentiment right. I can't blame them.
>would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something.
I'd prefer if everyone had proper control over the tools they used. Whether they choose to live in the woods to use such tools or use them to make society a worse place is the double edged of 'free' (as in freedom)
I completely understand those skeptical about perverse incentives from not making software 'free' (as in beer). It shouldn't be a surprise that adding monetary inventice changes the entire incentive structure.