... the amount of money depends on number of users and pain level of their problems. Which means it is not in your interest to develop robust and bug-free software.
Agreed. I've heard people refer to producing highly painful software in order to encourage support contracts as the "RedHat model" of open source software.
But it cuts both ways -- if you as a developer have a bunch of people signed up to pay you monthly, you'd like to get their money while doing the minimum possible amount of work; so there's an incentive for you to make your software bug-free and easy to use so that your supporters aren't bugging (no pun intended) you all the time.
Disclaimer: My company basically has this model for AI. We work heavily with consulting companies and have a licensing structure relative to the number of cpu/gpu cores you use.
We have found this to be a great way to charge. There's a clear value prop for the customer when they see what they get (usually compliance features, security,..). Also for both sides, there's some basic reassurances: The company won't disappear because they make money, and the vendor has incentives to do what they say they do.
A more mainstream company I think HN knows more of that does this is gitlab.
I'm definitely not a "save the world" type founder. I run a for profit entity focused on commercializing technology that captures a large market opportunity.
Our product is open core for marketing, recruiting, and distribution purposes.
Because we're open source, I get to write books, run classes, and speak at technology conferences all over the world as way of doing sales and marketing. Turns out it works.
As a side benefit, we also get a small share of the market that use us in academic research.
As a comparison: The major cloud vendors all "run" and market open source frameworks in AI to get more people to spend money on their compute clouds (same reason they give away credits).
Widely used open source projects usually have commercial backing somewhere in the chain.
My biased opinion I would love to learn counter points about:
These utopian platforms can't work. They might be a great way to make a short term living.
It feels like there wouldn't be incentives for maintenance or support under this kind of model for individual developers. My biggest reason for this is the support volume.
Once you get to a certain scale, that "small repo developer" has a risk of getting overwhelmed. Pretty soon they hire someone. Then it's not about just code anymore. Granted, you can share the work among several contributors eventually, but at scale, this becomes fragile at some point.
This is a big reason why these things end up being companies.
There will always be some amount of this at play. But changing motivation of people offering support ("you get paid because this works, not because it breaks") would result in much better software and better aligned interests of all parties involved.
Agreed. I've heard people refer to producing highly painful software in order to encourage support contracts as the "RedHat model" of open source software.
But it cuts both ways -- if you as a developer have a bunch of people signed up to pay you monthly, you'd like to get their money while doing the minimum possible amount of work; so there's an incentive for you to make your software bug-free and easy to use so that your supporters aren't bugging (no pun intended) you all the time.