Hackers in the Bazaar "blog" posts 😎
I’ll be honest - I didn’t actually do the reading. AKK inspired me, and after giving this week’s reading an initial attempt, I realized I had no idea what ESR was talking about the majority of the time. Further reading a few classmate blog posts, I was comforted to realize I wasn’t in the same boat regarding my confusion over the economical & business terms being used. So I’ll try my best.
So apparently ESR says service fees dominate. I can agree with that. They can certainly make more money than one-time purchaseable software, but would have to be done skillfully. I’m guessing what he’s referring to as “service fees” could relate to apps that we all know have some kind of “free version” with a paid path that unlocks further features for us to use, whether that option would be a one-time purchase or even a subscription model. This could certainly be effective if one made the free version so limiting that it would be downright annoying not to get the paid version. But then, there’d have to be some degree of balancing because if a free app is so bad, what’s stopping users from looking at alternatives? Same goes for making software free or paid in the very first place. You can’t charge something from the get-go and expect people to buy it if there are cheaper or free alternatives. The easiest way is to hook users into free software, and trap them into paid features because they’ve fallen to be enamored by the free version of your app so much. And that being said, I think a subscription model is the best model for service fees. Or maybe a hybrid of offering a one-time payment costing quite a bit vs. a subscription service, much like the site/app Memrise has. Why not give users more flexibility in how they want to pay? Do some fudging with numbers to make the two payment types equivalent in their profit.
Regarding independent peer review and closed-source “collecting rent,” I’m not so sure. Independent peer review is likely something essential when you’re intially launching some new product, but gets less important once you get to a stable point in your product that won’t require many changes later on. Overall, peer review is extremely important whenever a drastic change occurs to your product. Otherwise, small patches and updates here and there will most definitely not spark outrage anywhere, and from here we’re able to convert into a paid model. But also brings up to mind are ideas of donations in the form of Github sponsorships and Patreon. Here we’re able to remain open-source and collect rent. So as long as you’re not spending all your time maintaining a given project, the best route to go would definitely be remaining open source to get that peer review & collecting rent through these more modern methods. Otherwise, if your income totally depends on how much you’re making from this project, then you may have to focus on maximizing that and go with what I initially said.
Finally, as for big companies doing things with open source, I have no idea, so I’m going to leave my ears open to what my peers have to say and go from there. Some peer mentioned something about Mac OS and yeah, I don’t that going totally open source in the future. Unless? Overall I feel like hackers may be feeling a bit overwhelmed by big boy companies hopping onto the open source train to grab and pay for software. Overwhelmed, because it seems as if the spirit of open-source contributions would be tainted with incentives that don’t at all belong to the ideas of open-source. How many hackers for a given project are going to be working on the project for the sake of financial incentives, and how many are going to be working on the project for the project & their pure benefit? With this new mix of contributors, it seems logical that somehow the overall quality of projects would fall downhill, because the gold standard of content seems to originate from those who hack for the pure reason of hacking.
So why not leave alone these open source communities? I’m sure I don’t really know what I’m saying because I don’t have the awareness of real-life events regarding this topic, but it seems like it’d be better to solely focus on spreading the word of what true open source is, instead of trying to milk it by piling big boy pressure and financial incentives on top of it.