Yes there are lots of examples. They're not necessarily relevant to Observium. And there's many examples where the same/similar model has worked very successfully.

Unfortunately I do think an awful lot of Observium' primary market would consist of operations that, for various reasons, would use the code and not bother with an kind of support contract. I've worked in those kind of businesses before, and been that admin who wanted to pay something to ensure the project continued, but couldn't get management to even donate small amounts for open source software we were using very heavily; simply because they didn't see much of an incentive to do so. There's a "Meh, it's open source, someone will continue building that project without our money" kind of mentality in a lot of business folk; because the reason they're good at business is that they're greedy.

Sadly it is very necessary to make it simple for them: You get what you want only after you pay X.

So my 10 cents: I think Observium is better as a commercial operation; and paid subscribers should have access to features, either exclusively or just earlier, than those who are not paid subscribers.

I didn't need to see every single feature work on my own installation before I went and paid for the subscription. The demo instance was good enough to justify paying the ***low cost*** involved without doing any kind of detailed trial or PoC. Hell, I'm not even using half of the features at this point, I paid for it because it's a good piece of software (ignoring some of the older code...) and I want it to not just continue to exist but continue to improve.

If demo.observium.org was improved to show off more features, e.g. routing/L2TP/etc, that might help address some of these trial related queries.

-Colin

On 11 January 2015 at 09:38, Jacob Gardiner <jacob@jacobgardiner.com> wrote:

There’s more out there than just RedHat.

You’re just being a bit ignorant in that regards.

--
Jacob Gardiner
@jacobgardiner
On 11 January 2015 at 9:27:23 am, Adam Armstrong (adama@memetic.org) wrote:
Well, we already proved this stupid "mek ur munies from support herpderp" belief common amongst open source zealots is abject nonsense.

We make more money from support as a commercial operation than we ever did as pure open source, because businesses value a commercial product more than a free one, and are more likely to buy support for it.

In 7 years of being open source we made maybe $1000 in voluntary donations, more than half from one person (and I'm pretty sure he drunk-donated every time).

This is demonstrable fact, and is the primary reason were now commercial.

RedHat are the exception that proves the rule. The fact that no one can think of anyone else (no, Oracle don't count) who makes money should be enough to demonstrate that open source doesn't pay, but for some reason people are still convinced it does.

I don't know. It's like the software equivalent of trickle-down economics. No amount of evidence can sway ideologues.

Adam.

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On 10 January 2015 13:46:02 Tom Laermans <tom.laermans@powersource.cx> wrote:

Sorry, that's the GPL-centric view that does not cover world reality at all.

Also, they already see the whole thing. That's the part (90%+!) they're supporting by sending money. The bonus they get should not be the reason to support the project to begin with.
We offer trial licenses at 150 GBP. As a bonus you can test it for an entire year.

Lastly, I'm a bit confused why you think something needs to be GPL to be able to modify the source firstly, and the contribute the changes back second...

Tom

On 10/01/2015 13:15, Jacob Gardiner wrote:

Because they don’t give a shit about how you license it. As long as it works and you’ll fix it if it breaks.

If you GPL the full version and provide ongoing SLA & upgrades for the software, it wont make much of a difference.

Holding back features between versions actually widens the gap between getting trial users converted to fully paid users, Mainly because the guys that try your software out want to see the whole thing, and not just a subset of features when they trial it.

Besides, how do you think organisations that have development budgets contribute to products if they’re not GPL? More often than not, the requirement for “open source” software within a company is because they want their developers to be able to add and submit features back to the product.

On 10 January 2015 at 3:50:27 pm, Adam Armstrong (adama@memetic.org) wrote:

I'm not really terribly cool with commercial organisations benefiting from the costlessness of open source software. Why should someone who'll pay Cisco $50k for a router get my work for free?

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