What alternatives do people have to monetize software in a more ethical way?
I particularly don’t understand the funding that some software receive. What they have to grant to receive those funds?
I also search for some type of monetization “model” better than donations, but more ethical than ads.
If it’s too much to explain I would be grateful for terms or books that I could search later.
Paid builds. You get Access to the source code but you can either build yourself or pay a small amount to have a packaged built and updated whenever.
I also like the twice a year nag screen thunderbird or Wikipedia uses (KDE was right to start doing it too, in my books).
I don’t believe a small donate button in the “about” section of the settings screen is of any use.
Opensource and free to use, paid business feautures (like single sign on, telemetry) and support.
Paid support.
I like paid cloud or sync features for apps that you can do it yourself as well. Like Zotero or some writing apps
Sounds a bit like Rustdesk. I’m happily hosting a relay on my VPS but the ‘account’ features don’t work for the free version. I just keep them in a note instead.
Cloud services or features monetization are interesting, I’ve seen some companies do a community or a local version and the business version with more features.
The slippery slope that projects taking this approach fall into boils down to ‘let’s put all our new features behind a business version and never add them to the community version until they become 2 totally different code bases’
What other examples? :)
Good software is abstracted and free.
Applying it to a business effectively is where the money gets made ethically.
Contribute to the projects you use!
While I totally agree that this should be the case, I’m not sure it really works. Voluntary participation is among the first things to be cut when it comes to monetary gain maximization, and is often not even considered. And in some instances, like the publicly funded research institute I work at, there’s no funds dedicated to voluntary contribution to open source projects.
