
Help convince Media Browser's author to charge for his awesome product - jasonkester
http://www.samsaffron.com/archive/2009/06/24/Will+program+for+food+the+future+of+Media+Browser
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patio11
If you're going to write a blog post about charging money for software, you
can afford the $1 or whatever it is to actually buy the iStockPhoto instead of
leaving it up there in all its watermarked glory. That aside:

I'm going to run some quick numbers for B2C software, based on the 1k
downloads a day estimate and a few guesttimates from my experience:

Page views: ~4k

CPM rate: ~$2.50 ~ $5 (CPM rates for OSS sites that target businesses which
spend money on big business stuff can be fairly high. For consumer OSS, not so
much. The salient feature of consumer OSS users is that they like getting
things for free -- how much would YOU pay to advertise your software to them?)

Ads: $600 per month on the high end

Donations: 10 a month or so, average will be for below $5.

Paid Support: For B2C software? I consider myself an incurable optimist. I am
feeling cured now.

My suggestion: if you want to make money selling software, then you should try
selling software. You're worried about your community forking it. Your
community is not capable of forking it, nor do they have the inclination to do
the amount of work required to do so. They are here for the free stuff. It is
highly likely that there is no copy of your source code anywhere except on
your committers' computers and whatever your centrally accessible repository
is. If you were to turn that off one day, the source code would no longer be
available. And if you were to disable download of the free version, somebody
might actually notice.

You are worried a pro edition will make you your own biggest competitors.
Welcome to every shareware business ever. We all compete with ourselves,
effectively. It isn't trivial but it isn't impossible, either. (Hint: feature
limitations on behavior which identifies the people who most need your
software work great.)

[Edit to add: You may consider white-label versions to customize to the
requirements of studios&etc needing marketing devices. Take a look at
<http://www.mediabrowser.tv/images/gallery/g5.jpg> for a second. I wouldn't
want to have to be the guy who made the sale, but I could sure see Paramount
or whoever deciding "What the heck, that would be worth one hundred thousandth
of the marketing budget for Ironman" ]

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jasonkester
More about this can be found here:

[http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.761750.1...](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.761750.16)

Essentially, he has a really good product that sees 1000 downloads a day. It's
open source, and he can't afford to keep maintaining it for free. He's
reluctant to charge money for it, and gives a good explanation as to why.

It sounds like he's so worried about disappointing people that he'd rather
abandon the project entirely than do the logical thing: sell it as a product.

~~~
mishmash
I don't know why, but sometimes I find myself unwilling, or, at least hesitant
to profit from my favorite projects while others, have no problem.

Is it an art thing? Something psychological? Is he also experiencing this
effect?

~~~
jasonkester
Yeah, psychology must have something to do with it. I think it has something
to do with knowing exactly what sort of effort went in to the project.

We tend to think of Commercial Software as this Big thing that Big teams from
Big companies spend years to develop. Windows took 400 man-years or whatever
to develop and it only costs $79 a copy. Why should my thing that I spent less
than 500 hours on be worth that much?

From the outside though, nobody else can tell how hard it was to build. They
only see that it solves their problem and that it's valuable.

It's a false dichotomy (hard to build vs. valuable). We all have stories of
the 3-day hack we built that made the company $400K, and we've all seen
marketing guys go nuts thinking that our little internal tool could be re-
packaged as the Next Big Thing. If only we could muster that sort of
enthusiasm about our own stuff, we'd be a lot more likely to put a price tag
on it.

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messel
Bullseye jason. The value is not what you perceive it to be, what what users
are willing to pay. He needs a good monetization plan.

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DanielStraight
I think there are a few things everyone suggesting a monetization scheme
should consider. Here's a big one:

<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001201.html>

That's the post where Jeff Atwood explains the 90% software piracy rate. I
think it's one of the most illuminating posts he's ever made. If you close the
source, you will probably immediately begin to experience piracy, and it will
probably be at a rate around 90%. Make sure you have a solution for that
problem in your monetization scheme. (This also disproves that notion that
most people are willing to pay for software. I myself haven't paid for a piece
of software in years [though I don't pirate ANYTHING either].)

Consider also the GPL, which clearly states that the rights it grants are
irrevocable (section 2). Even if the source were closed for new versions (and
if the source were closed, and this is absolutely vital, the GPLed parts would
have to be rewritten since the GPL prevents inclusion of GPLed code in closed-
source projects [section 5]), the old versions would still be open source. If
the software is popular, I do not find it hard to imagine someone would fork
it... or just keep using the old version.

Keep in mind the author's comment that the software has benefited from being
open. Closing the source would also mean decreasing quality.

Finally, the goal of keeping your software hackable is noble. Hackable
software is a gift to programmers everywhere. It's not unreasonable to want to
continue offering this.

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felixmar
The author does not have to rewrite anything because he owns the copyright of
the work. The GPL is a license granted to other parties.

~~~
DanielStraight
Ok, that makes sense... but he still needs to rewrite the 30% submitted by
others.

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Tichy
Couldn't he get a job with Microsoft? He made the project to have something to
put on his resume. So presumably it will pay off when he lands a top job via
said resume.

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audionerd
What if he trademarked the artwork/themes distributed with official paid
binaries? And users who compile the source on their own just get a basic
white-label theme.

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audionerd
this is probably a dumb question, but re: charging for the binaries of a
program licensed under GPL -- are there any examples of a person/company doing
this successfully?

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yhnbhjiuok
I don't know bout sucessfully - haven't seen the accounts - but there are a
lot of examples from SUSE/IBM down to builds of SSL libraries

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alexkay
If you are not comfortable closing the source code then don't. Leave it open,
publish only the master branch, sell the binaries.

You will be charging for the installers and branch management / stabilisation.

Those who want your software for free will be able to build it. Some will
probably publish their own binaries, but I bet they won't maintain them. In
the best case they will just build off the master branch from time to time.

Many people want software to just work and are ready to pay for the
convenience.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I think this is worth a shot. He could sell the binaries and support.
Additionally, he could actually market it and use various sales techniques.
Perhaps he could bundle it with some other third party service and say you get
10% off on said service with a purchase or whatever. There are also other
techniques those better at this sort of thing could think of. It's worth a
shot. The alternative is not to try and not making any money off the venture.

