The solution to the “first adopter,” now left behind is not to be in denial. Sounds simple, eh? It's hard. You have to admit that you're not the best. That you've made mistakes. It's a skill best learned young. It's what you need to make rational choices. There's site devoted to such issues which I've found quite interesting.

Open source, free apps is well known too. There are lots of companies that make profit from open source software and the ecosystem around it. Red Hat has a revenue of > 1 billion USD, and their main product is open source. The provide training, certification and support. They also sell licenses, though I'm not sure how exactly it works (maybe that have some non-free programs in their portfolio, or they sell different licenses to those who don't like GPL).

Github seems to do fine with providing mostly free service, and charging for private repositories.

I think the key is to provide substantial additional value in the paid version, so that people see a good reason to buy it. And then don't charge just one dollar.

And one must realize that not all open source programs can be monetarized. You simply cannot sell alarm clock apps for smartphones, there are just too many free ones floating around, and there's a limit to how much better you can do.

Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

In reply to Re: "As software grows up" .. what do you do? by moritz
in thread "As software grows up" .. what do you do? by locked_user sundialsvc4

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