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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