So true. So true. I wish happy users would donate more as well.
Unfortunately when happy users get used to the culture of free and good quality software, they started to have a sense of entitlement (instead of donating). That if the software didn't provide exactly what they wanted, they starting to swear and whine instead of being... calm and helpful.
I think a big part of the entitlement problem is not being clear about the business model, or positioning oneself to take advantage of it.
One key thing is, I think, to advertise services and ways of making money. IOW, giving people the option to get new features, etc. is an important thing.
There is a lot of solid FOSS out there: PostgreSQL, BSD, Linux, CUPS, and more all come to mind. These often are less sexy than heavily marketed, inferior counterparts. But these all also have solid business models attached.
I highly recommend that folks who start open source software look around at business models surrounding the better open source products and see what they can do to capitalize on that.
I am really happy that this does not exist in the PostgreSQL community despite many of the core developers being consultants who live off solving their clients' problems with PostgreSQL. Maybe this is because it is a community project with no single company in control of it.
Maybe this is because it is a community project with no single company in control of it.
Yes. In an organization like Postgresql, someone's contribution is measured by how much they contribute to the code. In an organization like Mysql, someone's contribution is measured by how much they contribute to the bottom line.
It also started out as a research project, so for the first 10 years or so of its life, the main incentives for the developers were whether it was producing interesting research papers, rather than number of users.
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