I run a pretty decently-sized OSHW project that sells both b2b and b2c, and the biggest hurdle I can see is that this guy really likes making hurdles for himself.
Literally every single one of the "business hurdles" can be either trivially solved or ignored completely.
Payment processing takes 5 minutes to set up through PayPal or Stripe, and invoices can be generated manually for the few customers that actually ask for them through free online software like this:
https://invoice-generator.com/
The rest literally don't matter at all, at least not until you're selling >$1k worth of software a month. I don't mean just practically, I mean legally, at least under Australian law. If things are significantly different in the UK or NL, I'd be very surprised!
(I wouldn't call "Marketing" a hurdle either - it as much work as writing the software and requires as much skill!)
Of the technical hurdles, the only one that is an actual that needs to be solved in order to release an MVP is "Website with payment processor and downloads". Set up a $5 Wordpress droplet on DigitalOcean, install WooCommerce and spend an afternoon customising things. Go Shopify and eat the comission if you want to make things even easier. The rest can come later, once you've validated that a market for your product exists at all!
Agreed with all your points, but to be fair, when starting on this it can easily feel as a burden, at least it did for me. I also sense some insecurity, which is a very human trait. And not in the least, it can be good to understand where you are starting with, including all the details, even though it might drive down motivation knowing all the details :) I prefer stepping in naively and figuring things out later on :)
1. In my experience, he wouldn't need to start a company right away, only when it really takes of. In the context of income tax in the Netherlands, there is a grey area between hobby and commercial activity, which is not easily defined. Only when it starts to structurally be part of his income, does he need to write it on his income tax papers and register a company. That won't be needed when he is only taking off. (Try or try not, there is no do (Yodi) ).
2. In regards to setting up a registered company, you do get lots of sollicitors at the door and on the telephone. He already mentioned the prepaid phone, not sure if a postbox is possible and what it costs. But for now, it is not needed, see point 1. (edit: the KvK doesn't allow a postbox as address, but there are companies that offer using an address of their business centre for around 500 Euro a year).
3. Setting up a website with WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads is easy peasy. At first I didn't go this route, expecting this would be burdersome. I used a marketplace which took 30% of my sales, in practice even a bit more. Two years later I started to get unhappy with that (their support was awful) and switched to WordPress/EDD with just PayPal payments and it has been just great. I should have done that right away from the start. To be fair, my marketing is already taken care of because of a free/gratis main software package.
> The rest literally don't matter at all, at least not until you're selling >$1k worth of software a month. I don't mean just practically, I mean legally, at least under Australian law. If things are significantly different in the UK or NL, I'd be very surprised!
At least if you are in Germany you need to have a business incorporated when you want to sell to customers or businesses. You need to have a tax number/ID.and you need to provide not only an invoice, but in case of software also updates (at least from next year on, if you not have the customer explizitly opts out).
> At least if you are in Germany you need to have a business incorporated when you want to sell to customers or businesses.
No. You can act as a GbR. It’s a good idea to incorporate a limited liability company to shield your personal property from liability, but it’s not a requirement. If you do, a UG mbH will do just fine and is simple to set up, but requires proper bookkeeping.
You need to register for tax and at the Gewerbeamt likely (depends, ask a tax accountant about your specific case) but both are trivial. You do need to provide an invoice, but there are tons of options to make that simple - a word template may be sufficient.
> I don't mean just practically, I mean legally, at least under Australian law. If things are significantly different in the UK or NL, I'd be very surprised!
glad to see aussies here! however do know that the bureocracy in europe (EU and friends) and rules for small business operations are indeed significantly different (many more compliance requirements) than in australia. one thing that aussies will often find surprising are the compulsory monthly costs for running you own business (let alone a company)
European law is unfortunately very unfriendly to small businesses. For example, sending a correct invoice is a requirement, and you have to store them for at least 5 years. That can be done only if you have set up a corporation or self-employment and have obtained all the necessary identification numbers. Fortunately Stripe made things much easier, but still - beginning to process cards is lengthy. Paypal in Europe takes a very big commision and they will block your account and ask for the same lengthy card processing process after you make few thousands in sales. Taxes are hard to file yourself even if you do only local sales, and becomes impossible to manage yourself once you sell out of EU.
I’m selling an AGPL licensed app that allows to access IMAP/SMTP accounts over REST (https://emailengine.app). At first I sold it in a way where AGPL version was completely free and public, but you could pay to get the same thing with a MIT-license. Turned out that no-one cared about the license, everyone was happy to use the free AGPL thing, so I changed it in a way where the app is dual licensed under AGPL and proprietary license and you need a “license key” to fully unlock it. As it’s AGPL with source code available from Github you can freely remove that license key check, just a 1-line change. It’s still a big enough of a hurdle that I’ve actually gotten some customers.
I've been obsessed with those kinds of strategies for (A)GPL software lately. If it's true, like the critics say, that customers like locked-down, dumbed-down software, there's no reason we can't do that with GPL stuff - even though it can be easily bypassed in then source, and other distributors can sell clean versions, plenty won't.
GPL software should use the same predatory tactics as proprietary, and trend chase. Focus primarily on trend-chasing and marketing, focus on getting cash by any means necessary other than not making the source available. Market hard, dual license.
Dropping a license check in (as long as it's not obfuscated or intentionally confusing) is very cool in my opinion, and I wish you luck. Thanks for adding to the commons.
> GPL software should use the same predatory tactics as proprietary, and trend chase. Focus primarily on trend-chasing and marketing, focus on getting cash by any means necessary other than not making the source available. Market hard, dual license.
I'd rewrite this as "People who want to make money from GPL software should ...", because GPL software in general doesn't have to have a commercial goal.
Yes, it's AGPL with source code publicly available, but if you remove that license key check yourself, you have to make it public, effectively broadcasting that you don't pay for software. In a way, it's naming and shaming. The alternative is using the fork of someone else who has done so and complied with the license, but then you're suddenly dependent on some random downstream and who knows what else they have mixed or might mix into it or just give up merging from upstream eventually.
I wanted to integrate your project in another open source project that I was contemplating of working on. However, the licensing bit made me think twice about that. While I could see that under the terms of GPL I could easily remove the code that checks for the license, and that the code was not hidden or obfuscated in any way, but at the same time it just felt against the spirit of the project to do so for anything other than purely personal use. Hence I am evaluating other projects for my use case.
I think this approach of dual licensing is well suited when the intent is to let people audit source code freely for evaluation or personal use purposes, but then pay up when they wish to use it in their public/commercial projects.
How did you setup your contributor license agreement (assuming you have one in order to incorporate external contributions that you want to dual license). Just a GitHub PR template where they have to check a box to confirm they agree ?
I'm in a fortunate enough position that the day job pays the bills and I enjoy it, such that I don't need income from my open source efforts.
However, about a year ago I did two things:
- Enabled sponsorship through GitHub and Liberapay.
- Put my GPL apps (freely available on FDroid) on GPlay for $1.
Since then, I've made a fun amount of ~$300 in little donations (a combination of one off and recurring sponsorships). Although a tiny amount of income in the scheme of things, it is still thrilling each time someone kicks a small donation my way even though there is no obligation to do so. Itis a nice pat on the back for things I do for free anyway.
Also, given that I do zero self promotion and very minimal nagging (just in some of my release notes), and given I spend probably less than a total 7hrs a week on all of my projects combined, it makes me think that this could be ramped up if I was to dedicate more time to it.
Some things I try to do with each project to help gain traction:
- Release often, so it appears at the top of the FDroid front page regularly.
- Take i18n seriously so that people around the world can benefit from the apps.
- Foster a sense of community and inclusion in any discussions (e.g. GitHub issues and PRs).
I also try to add new apps whenever a new idea comes along. Hopefully a large diverse range of apps will find use with more people.
Hopefully in the future that $300 will grow to $500, $1000, or even more.
The author says "I'm a firm believer in free software."
I interpret that as someone who has a firm belief that proprietary software is immoral, or at the very least, distasteful.
That would include being opposed to the proprietary add-ons of an open core.
And that would be a reason to leave money on the table. (Analogously , I have a relative who owned a grocery store and refused to sell tobacco products, believing that doing so was immoral.)
In general, I think open core is an advertising model. In broad strokes: "Free software" uses a moral argument against proprietary software. "Open source" uses a cost/benefits argument that open source development is more effective than proprietary. "Open Core" uses the profits from proprietary add-ons to subsidize the open source component, which is the loss-leader marketing the proprietary add-ons.
One model that's worked for me, at least for desktop software, is to release an AGPLv3 core and minimum version that works on Linux, and charge for Windows and macOS versions that are proprietary.
If you go the route of using an (A)GPL core, make sure all 3rd party contributions are made under the terms of your CLA, or otherwise reject them.
> If you go the route of using an (A)GPL core, make sure all 3rd party contributions are made under the terms of your CLA, or otherwise reject them.
If someone goes down this route, does the rejection have to be automatic? Does looking at a pull request without a CLA "taint" me in a way that I cannot implement it again? I am asking partly because I am curious and partly because I remember Drew DeVault (sircmpwn) used to have a big scary warning saying if I have looked at the official minecraft code, I should not contribute to truecraft (now archived I believe).
These are things I never worry about at work. I can look at stack overflow and copy x.filter(x => x.blabla...) and change the bla bla until my javascript works (I don't use filter every day so it is difficult to remember this syntax in my head).
Honest question (I am totally ignorant about these things): If you did this, would you be able to accept patches from the community on the open core? Or would releasing your proprietary code violate the GPL of the coder who sent the patch?
I would say that it depends on how the core and addons are attached and how the core is licensed.
If the core is a library, and licensed under LGPL, the proprietary add ons can dynamically link to it without issue. You could take community contributions. This would not be true if the library was GPL. Anything that links to GPL has to be GPL compatible (make source code available).
If the proprietary addons are libraries and the core links to the addons, the users could violate the GPL when they link to them, unless you as the original author of the core, specifically enumerate the addons in the license you distribute to them. You would not be able to take community contributions in this case.
If the core communicates to the addons without adding the addons to its assessable region, such as talking over pipes or sockets, you would have no licensing issues even if the core is GPL and has taken community contributions.
You'd only accept contributions under a CLA that assigns copyright to you or your company, allowing you to distribute the code and its derivatives in any manner, and under any license, you want.
> Consider sponsoring me on Github. It means the world to me if you show your appreciation and you'll help pay the server costs.
>You can also sponsor me by getting a Digital Ocean VPS. With this referral link you'll get $100 credit for 60 days.
Asking people for money right at the top and putting referral links to help pay for server costs does not generate much confidence that selling GPL software is a viable business model.
Selling GPL software is objectively a terrible business model. If the entire proposition behind buying your software is "it'd be a pain to build this myself so I'll pay someone to compile the binary then give it to me", the only thing I can infer is that you have an unnecessarily painful build process.
Supporting GPL software, on the other hand, can be very viable. Another good option is licensing data to be interpreted/rendered/whatever by your GPL software.
End of the day, people don't buy software. They buy solutions to business problems. If the business problem can be solved for free by building the FOSS software yourself, there's no reason to pay the creator. On the other hand, if the creator sells "I will solve X business problem for you, this is an example of some of the FOSS software I will use to do so, but in the event this software is unable to properly solve the problem I will take whatever steps are needed to ensure it is solved to your satisfaction", it makes darn good sense to pay that creator to solve that problem.
Your example proposition assumes the source code is available at no cost from the developer, which isn't necessarily the case.
It's true that nearly all GPL'ed (and FOSS) software is available for download at no cost. But there's nothing in a FOSS license which requires a vendor to have a no-cost distribution mechanism.
The "Selling Free Software" sales proposition is that you can pay to get the GPL'ed software directly from the developer, or find an existing customer willing to distribute it to you for free, or at a lower cost. The latter step may also require additional diligence as now you have two vendors in your supply chain.
Patronage is like the new normal for supporting people creating things online. My only rub is I don't need a VPS and I'm sure as heck not going to support anyone through a Microsoft-owned venture. Payments don't need to be tied to corporations but a lot of people hate crypto (and the exchanges take a substantial cut). At least Liberapay is open, low-fees, not trying to be a loss-leader start-up, and not trying to be a social network.
On an unrelated note: I accidentally opened the OP in another browser where I don't have uOrigin and PrivacyBadger etc. installed and it's so full of ads one can barely read the article. Why would anyone put that many ads on their personal blog?
Cool. I suspect this model will mostly work, but only if the price of the app is low enough to not justify a lot of inconvenience by compiling it yourself or maybe getting it from f-droid. I like this model a lot, apps like OsmAnd do the same.
It’s tempting to think you can price GPL software at some “sweet spot” where customers think it’s worth it and you recoup your development costs. But then someone who hasn’t incurred your development costs can undercut you, even while offering the same or better service.
At least with AGPL software, if this happens, it will force those competitors to release their secret sauce, too. Those competitors will have to open source all of their changes, meanwhile as the copyright holder, you're able to release proprietary modules or changes at any time, and those competitors are out of luck if they want to use them. Should they attempt to compete on feature parity, their additions will need to open source.
Go and look at simple mobile tools. This person is selling Foss apps on google play store pro version but pro version is also on f droid for free and github.
Look at the downloads of pro versions and tell me if they haven't found it sucessfull
Readit News
Literally every single one of the "business hurdles" can be either trivially solved or ignored completely. Payment processing takes 5 minutes to set up through PayPal or Stripe, and invoices can be generated manually for the few customers that actually ask for them through free online software like this: https://invoice-generator.com/
The rest literally don't matter at all, at least not until you're selling >$1k worth of software a month. I don't mean just practically, I mean legally, at least under Australian law. If things are significantly different in the UK or NL, I'd be very surprised!
(I wouldn't call "Marketing" a hurdle either - it as much work as writing the software and requires as much skill!)
Of the technical hurdles, the only one that is an actual that needs to be solved in order to release an MVP is "Website with payment processor and downloads". Set up a $5 Wordpress droplet on DigitalOcean, install WooCommerce and spend an afternoon customising things. Go Shopify and eat the comission if you want to make things even easier. The rest can come later, once you've validated that a market for your product exists at all!
1. In my experience, he wouldn't need to start a company right away, only when it really takes of. In the context of income tax in the Netherlands, there is a grey area between hobby and commercial activity, which is not easily defined. Only when it starts to structurally be part of his income, does he need to write it on his income tax papers and register a company. That won't be needed when he is only taking off. (Try or try not, there is no do (Yodi) ).
2. In regards to setting up a registered company, you do get lots of sollicitors at the door and on the telephone. He already mentioned the prepaid phone, not sure if a postbox is possible and what it costs. But for now, it is not needed, see point 1. (edit: the KvK doesn't allow a postbox as address, but there are companies that offer using an address of their business centre for around 500 Euro a year).
3. Setting up a website with WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads is easy peasy. At first I didn't go this route, expecting this would be burdersome. I used a marketplace which took 30% of my sales, in practice even a bit more. Two years later I started to get unhappy with that (their support was awful) and switched to WordPress/EDD with just PayPal payments and it has been just great. I should have done that right away from the start. To be fair, my marketing is already taken care of because of a free/gratis main software package.
At least if you are in Germany you need to have a business incorporated when you want to sell to customers or businesses. You need to have a tax number/ID.and you need to provide not only an invoice, but in case of software also updates (at least from next year on, if you not have the customer explizitly opts out).
No. You can act as a GbR. It’s a good idea to incorporate a limited liability company to shield your personal property from liability, but it’s not a requirement. If you do, a UG mbH will do just fine and is simple to set up, but requires proper bookkeeping.
You need to register for tax and at the Gewerbeamt likely (depends, ask a tax accountant about your specific case) but both are trivial. You do need to provide an invoice, but there are tons of options to make that simple - a word template may be sufficient.
glad to see aussies here! however do know that the bureocracy in europe (EU and friends) and rules for small business operations are indeed significantly different (many more compliance requirements) than in australia. one thing that aussies will often find surprising are the compulsory monthly costs for running you own business (let alone a company)
It can be a psychological hurdle for people who hate and haven't accepted the concept of marketing.
GPL software should use the same predatory tactics as proprietary, and trend chase. Focus primarily on trend-chasing and marketing, focus on getting cash by any means necessary other than not making the source available. Market hard, dual license.
Dropping a license check in (as long as it's not obfuscated or intentionally confusing) is very cool in my opinion, and I wish you luck. Thanks for adding to the commons.
I'd rewrite this as "People who want to make money from GPL software should ...", because GPL software in general doesn't have to have a commercial goal.
>trend chase
>getting cash by any means necessary
>Market hard
I think you have a distorted view of the commercial software world. Of course you can find some bad apples but the majority just isn't like that.
Yes, it's AGPL with source code publicly available, but if you remove that license key check yourself, you have to make it public, effectively broadcasting that you don't pay for software. In a way, it's naming and shaming. The alternative is using the fork of someone else who has done so and complied with the license, but then you're suddenly dependent on some random downstream and who knows what else they have mixed or might mix into it or just give up merging from upstream eventually.
...for the users of the modified software, not everyone. If the only user is you, having the source code on your own machine is enough.
I think this approach of dual licensing is well suited when the intent is to let people audit source code freely for evaluation or personal use purposes, but then pay up when they wish to use it in their public/commercial projects.
However, about a year ago I did two things:
- Enabled sponsorship through GitHub and Liberapay.
- Put my GPL apps (freely available on FDroid) on GPlay for $1.
Since then, I've made a fun amount of ~$300 in little donations (a combination of one off and recurring sponsorships). Although a tiny amount of income in the scheme of things, it is still thrilling each time someone kicks a small donation my way even though there is no obligation to do so. Itis a nice pat on the back for things I do for free anyway.
Also, given that I do zero self promotion and very minimal nagging (just in some of my release notes), and given I spend probably less than a total 7hrs a week on all of my projects combined, it makes me think that this could be ramped up if I was to dedicate more time to it.
Some things I try to do with each project to help gain traction:
- Release often, so it appears at the top of the FDroid front page regularly.
- Take i18n seriously so that people around the world can benefit from the apps.
- Foster a sense of community and inclusion in any discussions (e.g. GitHub issues and PRs). I also try to add new apps whenever a new idea comes along. Hopefully a large diverse range of apps will find use with more people.
Hopefully in the future that $300 will grow to $500, $1000, or even more.
From direct experience, selling GPL code rarely works. And when it does, you know you're leaving a ton of money on the table (for no reason).
I interpret that as someone who has a firm belief that proprietary software is immoral, or at the very least, distasteful.
That would include being opposed to the proprietary add-ons of an open core.
And that would be a reason to leave money on the table. (Analogously , I have a relative who owned a grocery store and refused to sell tobacco products, believing that doing so was immoral.)
In general, I think open core is an advertising model. In broad strokes: "Free software" uses a moral argument against proprietary software. "Open source" uses a cost/benefits argument that open source development is more effective than proprietary. "Open Core" uses the profits from proprietary add-ons to subsidize the open source component, which is the loss-leader marketing the proprietary add-ons.
If you go the route of using an (A)GPL core, make sure all 3rd party contributions are made under the terms of your CLA, or otherwise reject them.
If someone goes down this route, does the rejection have to be automatic? Does looking at a pull request without a CLA "taint" me in a way that I cannot implement it again? I am asking partly because I am curious and partly because I remember Drew DeVault (sircmpwn) used to have a big scary warning saying if I have looked at the official minecraft code, I should not contribute to truecraft (now archived I believe).
These are things I never worry about at work. I can look at stack overflow and copy x.filter(x => x.blabla...) and change the bla bla until my javascript works (I don't use filter every day so it is difficult to remember this syntax in my head).
Thank you in advance.
If the core is a library, and licensed under LGPL, the proprietary add ons can dynamically link to it without issue. You could take community contributions. This would not be true if the library was GPL. Anything that links to GPL has to be GPL compatible (make source code available).
If the proprietary addons are libraries and the core links to the addons, the users could violate the GPL when they link to them, unless you as the original author of the core, specifically enumerate the addons in the license you distribute to them. You would not be able to take community contributions in this case.
If the core communicates to the addons without adding the addons to its assessable region, such as talking over pipes or sockets, you would have no licensing issues even if the core is GPL and has taken community contributions.
>You can also sponsor me by getting a Digital Ocean VPS. With this referral link you'll get $100 credit for 60 days.
Asking people for money right at the top and putting referral links to help pay for server costs does not generate much confidence that selling GPL software is a viable business model.
Supporting GPL software, on the other hand, can be very viable. Another good option is licensing data to be interpreted/rendered/whatever by your GPL software.
End of the day, people don't buy software. They buy solutions to business problems. If the business problem can be solved for free by building the FOSS software yourself, there's no reason to pay the creator. On the other hand, if the creator sells "I will solve X business problem for you, this is an example of some of the FOSS software I will use to do so, but in the event this software is unable to properly solve the problem I will take whatever steps are needed to ensure it is solved to your satisfaction", it makes darn good sense to pay that creator to solve that problem.
It's true that nearly all GPL'ed (and FOSS) software is available for download at no cost. But there's nothing in a FOSS license which requires a vendor to have a no-cost distribution mechanism.
The "Selling Free Software" sales proposition is that you can pay to get the GPL'ed software directly from the developer, or find an existing customer willing to distribute it to you for free, or at a lower cost. The latter step may also require additional diligence as now you have two vendors in your supply chain.
That said, it's still a terrible business model.
On the other other hand, it means that there is a big incentive from the software's own developers to ensure that the software needs support.
Yes but who here wants to work in support?
It reminds me of Newspaper websites these days. I think this is a statement about the current state of the web.
Look at the downloads of pro versions and tell me if they haven't found it sucessfull