Got a question that s been bugging me Let s say you create a

Question

Got a question that s been bugging me Let s say you create a new framework language and accompanying tooling that saves time and money for dozens of developers all over the world How do you balance openness and monetisation Do you open source the framework language but charge for the tools Do you keep it closed source Do you do self hosted SaaS and community enterprise split like Gitlab for example If you open it how do you earn money to let you work on it full time If it isn t hugely popular immediately you will have a hard time balancing earning money to live and working on it But if it s closed adoption will probably be low so customers developers will be wary to use it

Maikel · Answer

These are questions I have myself as well In my situation I currently get a subsidy for my project which comes in the form of discount on taxes which helps me to be able to spend more time on it but not full time In the near future I hope to find a customer who wants to use part of my project in such a way that I earn money by implementing there project with the help of my product In this case you will need to make good agreements on which parts of the code are yours and can be reused shared and which part of the code is theirs and will not be shared But I am not sure this approach will work A bigger problem for me is finding the right market focus I can multiple ways So I probably need to get that sorted out first

Emmanuel Oga · Answer

what kind of software are you guys talking about The answer of the question comes case by case right I m thinking of examples like say Adobe Acrobat vs the open PDF standard or open source databases like MySQL vs consultancy on companies like Percona In one case the format is open but some specific tool make const $$$ in the other the product is open but the consultancy costs $$$ too

Emmanuel Oga · Answer

Other examples I can think about I paid money for both the Cursive IDE for clojure and the <https www linqpad net > tool I m not really worried these particular tools are paid propietary

Emmanuel Oga · Answer

sublime text costs $ but is extensible

Emmanuel Oga · Answer

one more example REBL is a gui app that s distributed as a closed source jar file Under the honor system if you use it in a commercial setting you need to contribute to cognitect s patreon <https www patreon com cognitect>

Emmanuel Oga · Answer

also there s <https www clojuriststogether org >

Maikel · Answer

My project is a flow based programming editor with a flowrunner library It can be run standalone but I am also working on a web variant which could evolve in a saas model Currently I have flowrunner implementations in various languages javascript typescript php rust wasm c It can be used for learning building webapps and native mobile apps data exploration charting realtime debugging I still have to choose my main focus area It is in active development but fare from completion

Maikel · Answer

Are there people here who have experience with crowdfunding a FoC project When would that be a good fit

Maikel · Answer

and are examples the kickstarter campaign raised a lot of money Both are visual programming environments

J. Ryan Stinnett · Answer

This is definitely a tricky thing to balance and I have not yet seen what I would consider a great answer For my own projects of this shape I am planning to use an open self hostable model as I think it s critical for user control to be able to host it all yourself if you want A subset of premium features would rely on a hosted service which people could pay for or host themselves Here are some useful resources related to this Social vs market norms Premium features