Comment on Plex has paywalled my server!
tkw8@lemm.ee 1 week agoReally 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.
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.