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[–] 95 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I personally don’t mind at all if open source projects want to sell a “pro” version for businesses, as long as it’s still open source. Selling priority troubleshooting and dev attention to issues to businesses seems like one of the less offensive ways to fund open source projects in a capitalist society, imo

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  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I also don't mind if they are "selling" nothing, or just a supporter icon. As long as they are transparent that that is all you are getting.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That's pretty much it, right? ZorinOS Pro gives you some more desktop layouts, more wallpapers, and what they call "Zorin Installation Support service". Basically like buying a hat in a free game.

    But the "Advanced productivity tools" one is a bit misleading, apparently it's stuff anyone can install from the store it just pre-installs some unnamed apps for you.

    I don't mind selling some cosmetic stuff to fund development, the app thing is a bit shady though.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    Agree. I wouldn't even mind it if they were more open about what they're actually doing, as picking a well working set of apps from the sea open-source apps can have value.

    That said, if you read through that site it feels like they want to appear like it's them who created all that software.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Yes! I completely agree. The distinction is, to me, utterly important: they aren't selling the software, they're selling the service. Hell, if they want to sell the option to get your bugs fixed on demand, great! That's enormously different than taking millions of developer hours spent creating OSS, sticking a label and name on it, and then reselling it as if you made any real contribution to the OSS community.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    how the hell do you make something both open source and paid??

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    The way I was specifically talking about was for the project to be fully open source, but with an optional paid service aimed at businesses that ensures priority attention to bugs and feature requests. I’ve also seen open source projects with paid binaries, most commonly for iOS where it costs the devs money to keep an app on the app store so users can compile it themselves for free or pay for the (still open source) precompiled app. Open source and paid don’t have to be mutually exclusive, although the culture of free like freedom and free like free beer is great and I hope we never lose that.

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