On Thursday, November 28, 2013 at 12:10, Stanislav Yurin wrote: > Hello, Clojure community. > > I have been following the Clojure path for nearly two years now, and have > really great pleasure > using it in my personal and job projects, watching the community delivering a > lot of great things, > most of that I have yet to taste. > > For some time I was incubating an idea of introducing the infrastructure > which may help regular developers like > myself and businesses make some income from what we are creating on daily > basis, and improve the > creations further. > > In short, on top of every open greatness, it is good to have options. > > The last thing I am willing to do is to build something no one needs, so I > have decided to evaluate an idea. > The idea is simple: introducing the commercial option to the great ecosystem > we already have. > Proposed http://projars.com concept is similar to well-organised > clojars/leiningen/maven content delivery system but with > commercial products in mind. > > I have put the small introduction on the site, please feel free to subscribe > on site if you are interested, discuss, throw the stones > in my direction etc. > > Again, the link is http://projars.com > > Any feedback will help a lot.
Hi Stanislav, It’s an interesting idea to be sure. I think that, as open source and software in general “eat the world”, there will definitely be room for interesting new ways for people to be able to contribute to the community while still putting a roof over their heads and food on their tables. Soliciting donations/tips is one model. Crowd funding is another. However, in both cases I think there is an outlier effect at play where a few people will do very well, but most will never reach sustainability. On the other hand, there are some models that I’ve seen work very well for different people: * Premium features: a project where a large chunk of the functionality is available as open source, but some critical piece (usually related to scale) is only available to paying customers. Successful projects I’ve seen work this model include Phusion Passenger, Riak, Sidekiq, and Datomic. The quite obvious difficulty with this model is that you need to have a pre-existing product, probably a fairly sizable one, before people are willing to pay for premium features. * Feature bounties: an open source project where financial backers may pay some sum to have their pet features prioritized over others. LuaJIT, famously, has been completely financed via this model. The difficulty with this model is that you probably need to have a fairly well established reputation and project before just anyone is willing to pay you for a feature (also known as: we can’t all be Mike Pall). * Commercial dual licensing: if you release an open source project under the GPL, many commercial organizations won’t use it. However, as the author of an open source project, you are free to sell these commercial organizations a copy of the software under different licensing terms. This way the open source community can benefit, and the corporate lawyers can be kept happy at the same time. This is probably best recognized as MySQL’s model, but I know of others (including Glencoe Software, my current employer) who have made this work. The difficulty here is that, since you’d be providing the same source to both the community and to commercial entities, there *could* be some amount of policing needed to ensure that commercial entities aren’t just taking the open source version and violating your license (though I think such behavior is rarer than most might think). * Early access: fairly self explanatory…if you pay you get upgrades/features/bug fixes before the community at large. The one project I can think of off the top of my head that has had great success here is PyMOL. This model is probably easiest for someone starting out, as you don’t have to worry *so* much about the source being leaked if it’ll be released generally in 6-12 months anyway. Obviously, I don’t expect that your endeavor would be suitable for all of these models. There’s also the model I left out: just sell commercial software. If you’re concerned about providing a way for people to make some money while still fostering the open source community, though, I think it would be interesting to see what you could do to provide support and/or tooling for one or more of these models. Best of luck with the endeavor regardless! Cheers, Josh -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
