I personally don’t mind at all if open source projects want to sell a “pro” version for businesses, as long as it’s still open source. Selling priority troubleshooting and dev attention to issues to businesses seems like one of the less offensive ways to fund open source projects in a capitalist society, imo
Yes! I completely agree. The distinction is, to me, utterly important: they aren’t selling the software, they’re selling the service. Hell, if they want to sell the option to get your bugs fixed on demand, great! That’s enormously different than taking millions of developer hours spent creating OSS, sticking a label and name on it, and then reselling it as if you made any real contribution to the OSS community.
Isn’t this basically how Fedora and RHEL are? RHEL is paid for giving you support, updates, etc. While Fedora is FOSS. You just install it and they don’t care what you do with it.
That’s pretty much it, right? ZorinOS Pro gives you some more desktop layouts, more wallpapers, and what they call “Zorin Installation Support service”. Basically like buying a hat in a free game.
But the “Advanced productivity tools” one is a bit misleading, apparently it’s stuff anyone can install from the store it just pre-installs some unnamed apps for you.
I don’t mind selling some cosmetic stuff to fund development, the app thing is a bit shady though.
Agree. I wouldn’t even mind it if they were more open about what they’re actually doing, as picking a well working set of apps from the sea open-source apps can have value.
That said, if you read through that site it feels like they want to appear like it’s them who created all that software.
I personally don’t mind at all if open source projects want to sell a “pro” version for businesses, as long as it’s still open source. Selling priority troubleshooting and dev attention to issues to businesses seems like one of the less offensive ways to fund open source projects in a capitalist society, imo
Yes! I completely agree. The distinction is, to me, utterly important: they aren’t selling the software, they’re selling the service. Hell, if they want to sell the option to get your bugs fixed on demand, great! That’s enormously different than taking millions of developer hours spent creating OSS, sticking a label and name on it, and then reselling it as if you made any real contribution to the OSS community.
Isn’t this basically how Fedora and RHEL are? RHEL is paid for giving you support, updates, etc. While Fedora is FOSS. You just install it and they don’t care what you do with it.
I also don’t mind if they are “selling” nothing, or just a supporter icon. As long as they are transparent that that is all you are getting.
That’s pretty much it, right? ZorinOS Pro gives you some more desktop layouts, more wallpapers, and what they call “Zorin Installation Support service”. Basically like buying a hat in a free game.
But the “Advanced productivity tools” one is a bit misleading, apparently it’s stuff anyone can install from the store it just pre-installs some unnamed apps for you.
I don’t mind selling some cosmetic stuff to fund development, the app thing is a bit shady though.
Agree. I wouldn’t even mind it if they were more open about what they’re actually doing, as picking a well working set of apps from the sea open-source apps can have value.
That said, if you read through that site it feels like they want to appear like it’s them who created all that software.
Or for server software it can be funded with support contracts.