Nice, used to love playing with p5 back in the day, good to have such tools for Lua which is often recommend as a beginner language.
I wish the author did implement some built-in libraries like middleclass, that would allow people that don't necessarily understand how metatables to fake classes in more elaborate ways than what's showcased in the instances.lua example.
I think the route of giving it all away for free and either offering hosting if the project needs it or (business) support is the most successful way of doing this.
I have no problems whatsoever with donation buttons / banners (like Krita does) but I'm afraid random donations is not really a sustainable model for most projects. I try to remember to donate to projects I use a lot (especially if it's for work) but it is another thing on my todo list and not one with high priority, so I don't do it as often as I'd like ... 😓
That's possibly fine for services, but what happens when a large, well-known competitor decides to offer the service at a lower price (possibly on their own infrastructure), takes away the customers, but doesn't contribute back?
Also, how should libraries (aka stuff that can't be hosted or doesn't have an interface) be handled?
Yeah, very good points. A while ago there was talk about some kind of foundation where maintainers could bill their hours and people and big tech companies could donate. Not sure if / how that would work ...
During the xz incident I also talked about this on Mastodon and someone suggested that big tech could just employ maintainers without them having to do anything for the company directly, just work on the project / library the company uses. Again not everybody would want to do that ...
I'm afraid there's no easy one-fits-all solution here.
WARNING. Everything other than the last paragraph is kind of rude and opinionated, so skip to the bottom if you only want practical advice and not a philosophical rant.
First of all Free Software don't need paid developers. We scruffy hackers create software because it's fun. I have a strong suspicion that the commercialization of Free Software via the businessfriendly clothing "Open Source" is actually creating a lot of shitty software or at least a lot of good software that'll be obsoleted to keep business going. Capitalization of Free Software doesn't have an incentive to create good finished software, quite the opposite. The best open source software from commercial entities is in my opinion those that were open sourced when a product was no longer profitable as a proprietary business. As examples I love the ID software game engines and Blender. Others seem happy that Sun dumped the source code of Star Office, which then became OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but then again companies like Collabora are trying to turn it into a shitty webification instead of implementing real collaborative features into the software like what AbiWord has.
..and back in the real world where you need to buy food. Open Source consultancy, implementation of custom out-of-tree features, support, courses and training, EOL maintainance or products that leaverage Open Source software is my best answer. See Free Software as a commons we all contribute to, so that we can do things with it and built things from it. You should not expect people to pay for Free Software, but you can sell things that take advantage of Free Software as a resource.
I'll check this out later, but I've checked up on Redox from time to time, and they've been making steady progress. I sincerely hope they succeed, because I would love to see this competing with the likes of Linux, instead of other novelties like RISC OS.
The faircode model assumes that contributions from random outside people are minor and that the bulk of the work is done by the founder(s). To the founders there is little actual benefit from being an open source project, anyway. I can understand the attraction of the model in that situation.
My ideal OSS project would be receiving a steady stream of contributions from a wide variety of people without an elite sub group that considers themselves to be "the authors", which would be obviously unsuited to the faircode model. Sadly few projects achieve that and are largely the work of one person.
I needed to write in fields of a pdf and ran this quickly only to find out there wasnt such a feature. If I missed something let me know, it looks like great software.
My partner is on SSDI for disability. If she works, she will lose her SSDI income, but she's allowed to generate income that isn't work/labor.
She is exploring FOSS as a career path because she could accept donations and that wouldn't impact her SSDI. She understands donations would be minimal, but she's hoping it's a way for her to break into the FOSS scene.
Have used it for some months and it's great. I mostly use it for basic stuff like splitting / merging pdfs because im too lazy to look up the pdftk command.
But there are many more features like sanitizing (removing embedded JS code) or OCR (which works great).
She certainly can't break anything by using it, you can spin up a docker container and see for yourself. It's also localized in a lot of languages.
I don't think my own mother would do well with this, mainly because I think she doesn't know what the difference between a pdf and word or libre doc is. But apart from that, it is really simple.
I've used it a bit, mostly for merging/splitting some pdf files. Haven't delved much into the advanced features. Its been flawless for those tasks. It was also super simple to setup.
I use it a lot myself, started hosting during Christmas, and have since been one of my more used tools. And it's rock solid too. Has loads of features and is easy to use. Can't recommend it enough.
Three examples of open source software where at least one developer could give up their regular job and work full-time on the open source project. I'm sure there's more (The Linux kernel maybe ?) :
In both cases possible because of people donating. The last example is quite remarkable given the personal history of the developer and the fact that it was "just" a fun project with the developer sharing videos about programming for the fun project.
The best solution for a lot of problems. Imagine how awesome OSS could be if any dev could work on it at least part-time while still being able to eat and pay rent/mortgage.
Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)
Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)
I think those approaches are fully compatible with the open source definition, but please correct me if I am wrong.
(The examples I mentioned are just some of which I personally know and use, but of course they are many others)
One recent example I can give you is XnView. It’s a program that is free for personal use as an alternative to some specific Photoshop suite as well as some other paid photo viewers like ACDSee. But if you’re going to use this for any sort of commercial use, you need to pay for licenses for all computers you use this on. Such was the case for us since we needed it where I work.
Admittedly it’s integrity based for most of these programs. They are hoping that you are going to be honest about your usage and pay when you use it for commercial use. There doesn’t appear to be telemetry that reports back your usage as this is usually just some guy releasing his personal project. In the case of XnView, I feel it was a guy who was fed up with more recent updates to ACDSee and made his own that mirrors the older versions and just works.
We bought the licenses but I never really felt they were necessary to activate. But we had the proof if we were ever audited that we paid for commercial usage.
I pirate some stuff in my personal life, but these little guys who do this are seriously awesome and I try my hardest to follow their rules since it’s so convenient and helpful in my search and their approach is not ever privacy intrusive.
Another example would be WinRAR, if I remember correctly. They expect businesses to pay to use it but the general public of users just using it at home get the free, infinite “trial”.
Both of those aren't opensource (at least I can't find their repos on their webpages), but I see the model your proposing. Maybe just providing an option to pay at all, and not make it a donation, could work. The only problem I see is a competitor swooping in with a bigger team (or a team in the first place), and building upon the existing project to kill it in order to end up selling its own product. With non-restrictive opensource licenses like MIT and Apache, I assume it would be trivial. GPLv3 would make that a little harder.
Free and open source for selfhosting, paid when hosted by the company (e.g Nextcloud, gitea, cal.com)
Do you believe anything should be done if a large competitor takes over the business of hosting for other companies and hosting is the major revenue stream of the opensource project?
Free and open source with basic features, paid for proprietary business addons (e.g Portmaster, Xpipe)
That sounds like Open Core and I am for this, but there seems to be a dissatisfaction within the loud part of the opensource community regarding it. They don't consider it "open-source". Do you still count it as opensource?
Your proposals concern services or applications. Do you have any thoughts on opensource that isn't that e.g libraries, frameworks, protocols, and so on?
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