May work for some kind of projects, but may be a serious issue if you want to contain the number of features in your project. If people start asking about features that the core team of the project don't want to see inside, you are either going to say no or implement a plug-in system so that it will be possible to implement self-contained things useful for customers that are willing to pay.
Still I think that there is a fundamental flaw about all this: even if without a business model even open source software is a product, and if you turn it into a service in order to make some money there is something wrong about it.
It is probably better to ask for sponsorship in a different way: donations, write a book about the project and put it on lulu, ship a pay-only version of the software with some kind of feature not really needed but most users but absolutely useful for Enterprise-style users, and so on.
"...even if without a business model even open source software is a product, and if you turn it into a service in order to make some money there is something wrong about it."
I don't understand what's wrong here. Lots of fast food restaurants just use the food to get you in the door so that they can make a killing selling you sugary drinks. So long as you're making money, what's wrong here?
this are, in many ways, more a product than a service. It's the same few things, with the same price, with the same organization, replicated N times in different places of the country.
Btw what's wrong is that if you are creating a successful product you should focus on the product. This is how sofware works.
Photoshop is cool? It wins on the market, sells a lot of copies, they can focus more on the product. Immagine this turned into a service.
Photoshop is cool? You run a service of help desk and consultancy about it. Tons of people needed and high costs. Want to serve N customers? You need N/K people. Does not scale, you don't focus anymore on the product but on the service you are selling.
There is no "this is how software works." Software is the result of someone's work. If that person wants to sell that work, good for him. Who are you to decide how someone else should make a living?
Why do we persist in maintaining this silly premise that "Software" is somehow special or unique? It's a product just like anything else and as such it can be marketed, sold, rented, leased or just given away freely by anyone who makes it.
I think you misinterpreted my words. I mean, if you want to make money from software you should try to make money from the product you are building, not from services you (or everything else in theory) can give about the product.
So you can focus on your product and make it better and better.
No, I didn't misinterpret your words. My question is why should _you_ be the arbiter of my business model?
If I decide to make money from software by using it as a service, why shouldn't I? Maybe my natural gas prospecting software is world class OSS that I downloaded from SourceForge and tweaked a bit, but the real money comes in because I bundle it with my well-drilling services that I couldn't otherwise sell.
You're trying to limit what other people are doing to what you can imagine, and that's what I take issue with.
So long as people are paying, what's wrong? This tends to lead to a crappy product, but there's no law of physics or economics mandating that. (If the product is crappy enough, people will stop paying for both the product and the service.)
May work for some kind of projects, but may be a serious issue if you want to contain the number of features in your project
So branch. Nobody is forcing you to add the requested features to your main product... this will also encourage people to write good late-bound software - where extensions are trivial and play well together.
It's easy to branch the source code, but harder to branch the community, which can be one of the most important things. Sometimes a request for a feature comes with an implicit desire that it be in the main branch that everyone uses. Having good late-bound software would definitely ameliorate that.
Still I think that there is a fundamental flaw about all this: even if without a business model even open source software is a product, and if you turn it into a service in order to make some money there is something wrong about it.
It is probably better to ask for sponsorship in a different way: donations, write a book about the project and put it on lulu, ship a pay-only version of the software with some kind of feature not really needed but most users but absolutely useful for Enterprise-style users, and so on.
Cheers, Salvatore