From that graphic, as a beginner with SEO, this seems like your product would be super helpful. It seems like more education around how your product is better for SEO would be super helpful to users.
Hi, I was trying out your tool. But in the final step, where I need to apply and wait for my application to be cereated/deployed, it is showing build fail.
that's unfortunate, I just fixed it now. can you to the settings of your fork and scroll down and click "Delete the repository" and start from the step 3 of Launch Phase again.
Medium Looks Good, Just saying my view is Providing something for free is only good if you have something to monetise them later because if you don't the product will not survive and even if it did it will not be as good as competitors.
I've rarely found an issue with FOSS and the monetization for the project itself, given a couple of caveats.
First, the Afero license, aside from perhaps being a double edged sword, has helped some, for provider based or self-hosted solutions, but this isn't about licensing. I'll elaborate:
if you're a, VAR, Integrator, hosting provider, or enterprise solutions architect, and you are an advocate for FOSS, then putting your customer's money where your mouth is goes a long way towards ensuring that active development of the software you recommend and deploy remains active and keeps the product itself viable and relevant.
I personally demand/require that every single customer that uses and is happy with the solutions I provide, breaks out their checkbooks once a year and donates to each FOSS project leveraged by their business.
I keep a calendar with alerts, and then I call and remind usually either the CFO or CEO to make their annual contribution to those projects - it's mandatory! Or they can find someone else to host and run their infra.
I don't say how much. Ever. Or even suggest a number. What I tell them is, "I dunno, $5 or $5000, whatever YOU think is fair based on the value you've received from it in your business operations".
They're usually quite generous too, (shameless plug coming...) Prolly coz shit that I build and deploy doesn't go down very often lolz. But much of that is also a testament to the quality of the FOSS projects I vet and deploy too.
I figure that labor is always gonna be what it is, and the customer has to incur that regardless of whether they're using free software or a proprietary solution.
So if there's no license fee why not give back?
Over the years I have been sought out by many a dev and thanked for this, and I believe that more service providers like me that are going to make money regardless should demand this of their customers. One guy was almost in tears after hunting down my contact info from my customer using his software - it enabled him to afford Christmas gifts for his wife and daughter, but he would have continued to maintain his FOSS contribution anyway, for richer or poorer.
shrewd devs and project leads know that they can earn cash in labor, supporting the products they publish, it's even better when the support they provide is to the vendor, who passes that cost on to their customer rather than having to deal with the end users themselves.
visionary devs and project leads know they can make a fist full of dollars providing hosting services for their own software directly to the end users or even better, the vendors. The latter is a type of distribution channel that keeps everyone happy - the VAR, the end user customer, and the dev team, with top notch comminations and support.
Where this model fails is when the dev is a fricken' dik. Cases in point:
Bacula - they fiddled with their licensing, stopped accepting contribs under FOSS licenses, and discovered that their most staunch supporters absolved themselves of their association with them and simply forked the software. Now, we have several FOSS projects like BURP that arguably, are superior to the original software.
MySQL - the Evil EllisonCO, destroyer of Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice (OOo) and much more, pissed off Monty so much that he just turned around and released his fork, MariaDB. The visionary Patrick Volkerding was the first to make it the default package in his distro Slackware, followed soon after by the German fork of Slackware, SuSE, and then everyone else like CentOS and Debian. All major distros ship with MariaDB nowadays as the default, instead of MySQL.
ownCloud, one of the first to truly exploit the GNU Afero license for pure evil, found that all of the core devs and the founder himself had defected, creating their fork NextCloud. Nowadays, when someone says ownCloud what they really usually mean it's NextCloud, lol.
Shitty people that entrap you into vendor lock-in... HubSpot, an effective, quality inbound marketing suite was always proprietary, but when you really count the beans it truly costs about $1500/mo... To start. Yes it does and I'm not going to argue with anyone about that either. They host your website, control your DNS, MTAs, etc etc., Migrating away for most folks is hard. Certainly, it's non trivial even for someone like me. So Mautic was born - FOSS from scratch, and they leverage the Afero license to support "enterprise" premiums and make the pricing of their SaaS offering attractive. I'm not happy with this enterprise premium model, but the community edition does what it does really well and the dev has made sure that it's a viable product in its own right, self standing in a self-hosted environment. If you really think you need the few pricey extras, you can license the enterprise version.
So there's four cases in point of Enterprise FOSS solutions that would be successful in their monetization even if they weren't already sight out and in general production by Fortune 500 companies.
Shitty software just sucks, whether you have to pay for it or not, and whether it's proprietary or FOSS, and I've seen more shitty closed source software in my life than I have shitty open source software.
So yah, @theindianappguy , I don't completely agree with you on that monetization point. I agree that in most cases, monetary considerations are indeed warranted, advisable even, but in the case of BURP it's been around and we'll maintained for many years with zero monetization, much to the chagrin of Bacula's creator, because so many Fortune 500's prefer it over Bacula and other enterprise DR solutions; and virtually every GNU tool you use on the UNIX CLI everyday has never been monetized.
I didn't even mention cases where someone didn't have the software they needed and so wrote their solution from scratch to be the best there is, deciding to maintain it for the community for free as well. - FrontAccounting is but one such example of Enterprise MRP in that respect.
Where I have always seen the biggest weaknesses in FOSS is in the documentation itself, generally speaking - not the products.
Much of the success of non-monetized FOSS is due to the belief in the philosophy itself, and the altruism of selflessness as being it's own reward.
The perks along with the basics are technical. This sits on top of a newer technology GatsbyJs, letting us keep the performance fast for many more modern use-cases like embedding a youtube video without impacting the page loading speed.
From that graphic, as a beginner with SEO, this seems like your product would be super helpful. It seems like more education around how your product is better for SEO would be super helpful to users.
Hi, I was trying out your tool. But in the final step, where I need to apply and wait for my application to be cereated/deployed, it is showing build fail.
that's unfortunate, I just fixed it now. can you to the settings of your fork and scroll down and click "Delete the repository" and start from the step 3 of Launch Phase again.
Hey All, I wrote a blog explaining why I built this starter kit.
Medium Looks Good, Just saying my view is Providing something for free is only good if you have something to monetise them later because if you don't the product will not survive and even if it did it will not be as good as competitors.
actually I don't run the site on any of my own infra, it runs render.com - an entirely free service. The operational cost is zero for me.
but still try to add a revenue source be it just i will set it up for you for just 47 dollars as simple as that some people will surely go for it
this will incentivise to make the product better and promote it to more people hence making bigger impact
I've rarely found an issue with FOSS and the monetization for the project itself, given a couple of caveats.
First, the Afero license, aside from perhaps being a double edged sword, has helped some, for provider based or self-hosted solutions, but this isn't about licensing. I'll elaborate:
I personally demand/require that every single customer that uses and is happy with the solutions I provide, breaks out their checkbooks once a year and donates to each FOSS project leveraged by their business.
I keep a calendar with alerts, and then I call and remind usually either the CFO or CEO to make their annual contribution to those projects - it's mandatory! Or they can find someone else to host and run their infra.
I don't say how much. Ever. Or even suggest a number. What I tell them is, "I dunno, $5 or $5000, whatever YOU think is fair based on the value you've received from it in your business operations".
They're usually quite generous too, (shameless plug coming...) Prolly coz shit that I build and deploy doesn't go down very often lolz. But much of that is also a testament to the quality of the FOSS projects I vet and deploy too.
I figure that labor is always gonna be what it is, and the customer has to incur that regardless of whether they're using free software or a proprietary solution.
So if there's no license fee why not give back?
Over the years I have been sought out by many a dev and thanked for this, and I believe that more service providers like me that are going to make money regardless should demand this of their customers. One guy was almost in tears after hunting down my contact info from my customer using his software - it enabled him to afford Christmas gifts for his wife and daughter, but he would have continued to maintain his FOSS contribution anyway, for richer or poorer.
shrewd devs and project leads know that they can earn cash in labor, supporting the products they publish, it's even better when the support they provide is to the vendor, who passes that cost on to their customer rather than having to deal with the end users themselves.
visionary devs and project leads know they can make a fist full of dollars providing hosting services for their own software directly to the end users or even better, the vendors. The latter is a type of distribution channel that keeps everyone happy - the VAR, the end user customer, and the dev team, with top notch comminations and support.
Where this model fails is when the dev is a fricken' dik. Cases in point:
Bacula - they fiddled with their licensing, stopped accepting contribs under FOSS licenses, and discovered that their most staunch supporters absolved themselves of their association with them and simply forked the software. Now, we have several FOSS projects like BURP that arguably, are superior to the original software.
MySQL - the Evil EllisonCO, destroyer of Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice (OOo) and much more, pissed off Monty so much that he just turned around and released his fork, MariaDB. The visionary Patrick Volkerding was the first to make it the default package in his distro Slackware, followed soon after by the German fork of Slackware, SuSE, and then everyone else like CentOS and Debian. All major distros ship with MariaDB nowadays as the default, instead of MySQL.
ownCloud, one of the first to truly exploit the GNU Afero license for pure evil, found that all of the core devs and the founder himself had defected, creating their fork NextCloud. Nowadays, when someone says ownCloud what they really usually mean it's NextCloud, lol.
Shitty people that entrap you into vendor lock-in... HubSpot, an effective, quality inbound marketing suite was always proprietary, but when you really count the beans it truly costs about $1500/mo... To start. Yes it does and I'm not going to argue with anyone about that either. They host your website, control your DNS, MTAs, etc etc., Migrating away for most folks is hard. Certainly, it's non trivial even for someone like me. So Mautic was born - FOSS from scratch, and they leverage the Afero license to support "enterprise" premiums and make the pricing of their SaaS offering attractive. I'm not happy with this enterprise premium model, but the community edition does what it does really well and the dev has made sure that it's a viable product in its own right, self standing in a self-hosted environment. If you really think you need the few pricey extras, you can license the enterprise version.
So there's four cases in point of Enterprise FOSS solutions that would be successful in their monetization even if they weren't already sight out and in general production by Fortune 500 companies.
Shitty software just sucks, whether you have to pay for it or not, and whether it's proprietary or FOSS, and I've seen more shitty closed source software in my life than I have shitty open source software.
So yah, @theindianappguy , I don't completely agree with you on that monetization point. I agree that in most cases, monetary considerations are indeed warranted, advisable even, but in the case of BURP it's been around and we'll maintained for many years with zero monetization, much to the chagrin of Bacula's creator, because so many Fortune 500's prefer it over Bacula and other enterprise DR solutions; and virtually every GNU tool you use on the UNIX CLI everyday has never been monetized.
I didn't even mention cases where someone didn't have the software they needed and so wrote their solution from scratch to be the best there is, deciding to maintain it for the community for free as well. - FrontAccounting is but one such example of Enterprise MRP in that respect.
Where I have always seen the biggest weaknesses in FOSS is in the documentation itself, generally speaking - not the products.
Much of the success of non-monetized FOSS is due to the belief in the philosophy itself, and the altruism of selflessness as being it's own reward.
I hope that helps :)
⛵
.
I wrote this blog to explain in depth why I built it.
This comment was deleted 3 months ago.
The perks along with the basics are technical. This sits on top of a newer technology GatsbyJs, letting us keep the performance fast for many more modern use-cases like embedding a youtube video without impacting the page loading speed.