I've considered opensourcing some business products and researched the various models for doing so. I found three main ones:
* pay for support, like ardour
* pay for additional features, like gitlab on-premise
* pay for hosting, like piwik, or gitlab.com
I'm not a big fan of paying for support, like mentioned in the article, because support is not just something you give to your users, it's also useful for you: if someone spotted a big bug (possibly a security issue) but is not paying for support, don't you want to know it? Asking to pay for support is also creating a lot of tension, because people will ask for help anyway, and you have to tell them they won't receive it if they don't pay.
Paying for features is an obvious and efficient way. But I also like the idea that someone in a country where what I consider a decent price is actually a big part of the income can still manage to use my product to its full extent, provided they make an effort to use it.
That's why pay for hosting seems the best way to me for opensource products : everybody can use the product to the full extent, no issue is ignored, people pay for comfort.
Obviously, this works for the products I mentioned because they are ... products, and not libs. But I think it can apply to libs as well:
* pay for support : the idea mentioned in the article
* pay for features : this is something Sidekiq is doing, would love to know how it goes for them
* pay for hosting : this one is tricky, maybe offer to help implementing the lib in customer product? Hardly scalable, though
I would say that for libraries, paying for additional features is what makes the most of sense for me.
* pay for support, like ardour
* pay for additional features, like gitlab on-premise
* pay for hosting, like piwik, or gitlab.com
I'm not a big fan of paying for support, like mentioned in the article, because support is not just something you give to your users, it's also useful for you: if someone spotted a big bug (possibly a security issue) but is not paying for support, don't you want to know it? Asking to pay for support is also creating a lot of tension, because people will ask for help anyway, and you have to tell them they won't receive it if they don't pay.
Paying for features is an obvious and efficient way. But I also like the idea that someone in a country where what I consider a decent price is actually a big part of the income can still manage to use my product to its full extent, provided they make an effort to use it.
That's why pay for hosting seems the best way to me for opensource products : everybody can use the product to the full extent, no issue is ignored, people pay for comfort.
Obviously, this works for the products I mentioned because they are ... products, and not libs. But I think it can apply to libs as well:
* pay for support : the idea mentioned in the article
* pay for features : this is something Sidekiq is doing, would love to know how it goes for them
* pay for hosting : this one is tricky, maybe offer to help implementing the lib in customer product? Hardly scalable, though
I would say that for libraries, paying for additional features is what makes the most of sense for me.