Really glad you replied. Thank you. Your points are really good ones. I want to build something (software) for myself and the community but also struggle with where to draw the line when it comes to making my product generate revenue too. It’s a thing we don’t really talk about when it comes to OSS. Maybe we should create a new category called SOSS, (sustainable oss) lol.
Comment on Plex has paywalled my server!
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 week agoFrom my view, a sustainable business model is very different from the way things are done lately. I built and managed multiple successful businesses and making them sustainable is doable without fucking over your customers.
They could absolutely have done a lot better things to gain more income. The important base question here is “how much do they need?” Because software does not have huge ongoing costs but massive initial costs and lower sustaining costs. Of course, large changes or complete makeorvers will be intense but they are not needed in every company.
Once that is clear, they could have started with better public relations, engaging people about the need for a specific sum or recurring revenue. They could have gamified it by selling badges, additional functions, tiers, restrictions on new installations, etc. But they didnt. They chose to paywall existing functions. one. After. The. Other.
Dick move.
So yeah, building a business is no joke but thats not for me.
tkw8@lemm.ee 1 week ago
wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Some FOSS projects are supported by having a for-profit company offer turnkey packaging and support for those projects. Look at TrueNAS. They sell nice NAS hardware preconfigured with their software and the profits support the development.
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 week ago
Good point. I wanna point out that plex is not foss. Its closed source software which makes those moves even more idiotic because they could have paywalled new servers and accounts instead or weaned people off from their servers if they use local only, etc.
But yes, one only needs to look at foss projects like lemmy, pixelfed, kde, gnome to see how it is done. This absolutely means you have to have more people than just yourself or you will definitely burn out.
Tldr: some use gov funding, kickstarter, additional features, turnkey hosting, explain and ask for donations, etc.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 week ago
Saying software does not have huge ongoing costs shows you’ve never worked on any huge software system. My works ongoing costs for hosting/scaling/storing data are millions of dollars a year.
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 week ago
You’re both right and wrong.
Its like saying “saying a company is easy to run shows you have never run an huge company.”
Both are false dychotomies. The amount of hosting costs, manpower, etc does not come from the project but how it is set up.
If you have to run servers for a software at all determines the cost for hosting for example. Same for every other aspect.
Linux is a huge software project I’m working on. Yet the cost of it is a joke compared to its size. It has way more users than plex.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 week ago
You were the one that made the claim that “software doesn’t have huge ongoing costs”, which is what I said is wrong. Lots of software does, as you now agree.