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I don't have a project but I have always been wondering if there is some open-source style software (with a license that allows this of course) that would let me customize the software and sell it to other businesses and get small recurring income as a SaaS product (like $70 a month). Think small restaurant inventory management, pricing, CRM, software for real estate brokers to manage clients, dentist online appointment tracker etc. etc.

Thoughts ?



There are a few businesses built around that model: https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/, https://www.phacility.com/, etc. I attempted it once but quickly lost motivation because 90% of the initial work is marketing which I don't really feel passionate about (nor am I good at it).


You don't need to for most open-source software. You are free to take any GPLv2 software, modify it and host it on your own servers and charge a usage fee, all without publicly releasing your changes - it's an unforeseen catch in certain open-source licenses that only requires source release if the customer can get their hands on the binaries - if it's accessed through a browser or over the network then they lose that privilege.


This is what AGPL fixes, BTW. That's why many web based tools are under AGPL.


The key is selling it.




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