HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is wrong with 1$ subscription license for open source softwares?

6 points by majidazimi ↗ HN
Every now and then I see core teams of open source softwares who are struggling to develop their software in a sustainable manner. The question that surprises me is: what is wrong with 1$ subscription license per year/month?

Lets say Canonical asks for a 1$ subscription license per month. With 10 million regular users and many more in server environment it is damn easy to earn 100 million dollars per month. I believe 90% of users are only using 10-20 application on daily basis. Then Canonical could hire some professional developers for these major applications/libraries/frameworks.

Almost everyone could pay 1$ per month. At least we get more high quality - sustainable - open source software.

Why is everyone focusing on two extremes? Either fully free software or deadly commercial one with $$$ license?

7 comments

[ 11.8 ms ] story [ 32.2 ms ] thread
slitaz
The problem is that you cannot force a "subscription" with open-source software. It would not and should not be called subscription.

You could ask for a regular/monthly contribution. There is something similar with Ubuntu and others; when you download Ubuntu, you are asked to make a voluntary monetary contribution.

majidazimi
Whatever the name is, it is definitely possible to build a distribution around subscription model just like commercial distributions as RHEL. It only needs to reduce the price so much that no one cares about the fee. The company needs a predictable and sustainable income - business model - to plan for future. I call donation model a hopeful business model.
burntrelish1273
The model of "freemium" OSS of paid and community editions is pretty popular: Zimbra, JBoss, Postgres, MySQL, etc.

Ubuntu is special because there's only one version for community and commercial, which can have paid support, whereas RHEL/CentOS is kind of a hack-around that they might as well make completely free except for the commercial packages (RPMs).

anarazel
How's Postgres a freemium project? There are commercial forks, but they're not done by the people running the .org project, and they're not particularly popular in comparison.
burntrelish1273
Every FOSS project is freemium when vendors offer support.

Furthermore, your assumption that populist obscurity is some how a negative is FUD and ignorant of Postgres' historical obscurity until recent years.

EDB is the largest commercial vendor with EDB Postgres Plus being a compatible, cheaper Oracle DBMS replacement.

Furthermore, they contribute upstream all the time.

https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/new-postgresql-tools-are-l...

mstolpm
Some problems: Collecting small sums of money from lots of people isn't very cost efficient. OS teams don't have the manpower and tools to handle this at scale. There is no penalty for not paying (or enforcing something like that would be too expensive), so millions of users will just trial the software indefinitely without paying. In company environments, small regular payments have a very huge cost-overhead due to the formal processes involved and compliance/regulatory rules.

All this would most likely kill the attractiveness of the solution and one would switch e.g. from Ubuntu to another Linux distro not requiring a perpetual license.

majidazimi
Then how Spotify collects 10$ per month? Register user with email and get her credit card number. Ban temporary email providers. After trail period start charging. For enterprises charge company for a batch of registrations. I'm just curious to know why it is difficult.