If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
There's nothing stopping you from charging money for FOSS software. Sell the first one for as much as it cost to write it.
I assume you mean "sell it before you open source it."
If you found one willing buyer while it was still closed source, odds are there are others. Why rob yourself of additional income? Open sourcing does happen from closed source, but usually that's long after the income stream has exhausted itself (see, e.g., https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos).
Are you aware of what FOSS stands for?
Honestly, there's a real elegance to this model.
I'd argue the best possible model for goods that have no marginal costs (aka IP) is the "pay me to create it" model.
As in, let a creator decide how much they value creating the work. Then pay them that to create it - then release it free for everyone.
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No ridiculous societal restraints that cost time and money to enforce (poorly) as IP law. Compensation is happening. Creating is encouraged.
Practical constraints make it unlikely we'll get much closer to this than Kickstarter (and equivalents) but it's a very honest model, that works with intellectual property by default.
There's nothing stopping you, true. But I think you will find that nobody is going to buy software for whatever thousands of dollars it took you to make it. So the limitation in this case is a practical one, not a legal or moral one.
That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
In what world was Netscape a failure? Made some people an awful lot of money and then gave us Firefox... Pretty far from failure
Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc.
Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
Netscape lost the ability to charge before it went open source. Among other things, Microsoft released internet explorer for free (part of embrace, extend, extinguish, afaik).
The open sourcing of Netscape 5.0 happened in early 1998, and AOL purchaed Netscape later that year. Firebird/Firefox came a few years later.
Netscape was included free with almost every ISP installation disk.
First, a self-correction: Netscape did not produce open source products until it open-sourced Navigator 5.0 in 1998. Until then, Navigator was freeware: free to download and run, but not open source.[1] I shouldn't have mentioned them, but my point still stands.
Second, it depends on what you define as success and failure. Netscape made its pre-IPO shareholders money if they timed their stock sales right. But the stock didn't go up because the company was profitable. It went up along with every other dot-com stock until the 2000-2002 crash, based on hopes and dreams, not fundamentals. The company never turned anywhere near close to a profit.
To me, a successful company is one that makes a sustainable profit based on its business fundamentals, not one that makes its founders and early investors rich in an investment bubble.
[1] Correction: Netscape did charge for the browser if used in a commercial context, but few people actually paid up.
Netscape was actually selling a licence, which became free for endusers and eventually the entire browser was free, as the company concentrated on its Enterprise Server as a source of revenue. Netscape becoming freely available for endusers is pretty much what made the Web a mass phenomenon.
>Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because
1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free",
and
2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.
I have found not all open source to be the same in the modern era. The FOSS of yesteryear has been replaced by a lot of projects aimed at enterprise where the FOSS offering is the "free demo." This may have been novel and clever of the original pioneers of the practice, but there's a lot of cargo culting going on.
The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free.
Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them.
No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated.
So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0.
Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.
> if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free.
That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
The label has not lost its meaning. Everybody knows what it means and wants it, just almost everybody “selling it” is claiming it without regard for the truth of their claim for their own financial gain. In polite society that is called lying and fraud.