On 2014-03-26 14:08, Kleber C. S. Coelho wrote:
Just think education fits anywhere, his response was rude. As I said in the original topic, I can understand the reasons for doing different versions, but I disagree. There are other ways to make money from free software.
You are wrong. There are no other ways to make an appreciably useful amount of money from free software unless your software is a component of a larger system which makes a corporate entity a lot of money. Good examples of this are Linux and Netatalk. Both are sponsored by companies who rely on them to make a profit.
For end-user software, there really is no other way to make money other than the freemium model. We tried for 7 years, we made next to nothing. Once we realised that our user base was willing to pay to have the software better maintained, we went that route. It seems to us that people would rather pay for a better product than pick up Stallman's spiritual droppings.
IMHO, the Free/Open software movement has partially failed, because it doesn't provide a means of support for people who write 90% of the software. Just because the Linux kernel gets heavy funding doesn't mean anything else does. This lack of funding results in heavy stagnation, like with GIMP.
At the end of the day, almost all of the free software you use is written by someone who is effectively working as a slave, and your belief that "free software" is automatically better is severely flawed.
A good analogy was the rise of socialism/communism at the beginning of the last century. Sure, almost every economy now uses modified socialist principles, but that doesn't mean the initial vision was anything more than totally batshit crazy and proved, after a lot of time was wasted, to be unworkable. The same applies here. Free software can't support itself, so a modified model is needed. I think the Freemium model works well for our kind of product, but I can't say about others.
adam.