As a developer, I like to get paid, but the issue of monetising something you already gave away for free is more complicated than that and the idea that somebody can build an effective business on something like caddy is probably a tad unrealstic.
There's a long list of free shit that we're building on top of. It's a bit like somebody sticking a cherry ontop of a free cake then trying to charge for it.
This is why a lot of people just go down the consultancy route. I imagine Matt Holt will be better off simply from being the author of a famous project.
Don't get me wrong though, if the project can monetise Caddy, all power to them.
Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine fame once wrote a piece called Better than Free which I think kind of distills key points against competing with anything that can be had for free on/from the internet [0], which are:
1. Immediacy (pioneer?)
2. Personalization (bespoke?)
3. Interpretation (consultancy?)
4. Authenticity (brand?)
5. Accessibility (SaaS?)
6. Embodiment (concierge/luxury?)
7. Findability (marketing?)
I'm not sure if anyone else has written abt this, but I'd like to read more.
Yes, basically this translates to that if you write a FOSS program and give it for free, you can start a side business for it with 10x the effort (marketing, polish, etc) needed than if you were selling it proprietarily, for 1/10 the profits...
> Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine fame once wrote a piece called Better than Free which I think kind of distills key points against competing with anything that can be had for free on/from the internet [0], which are:
Or maybe, you know, just have a better product. Case in point: NLEs. There are a whole bunch of free and sometimes open source NLEs, most of which just aren't particularly good.
There's a long list of free shit that we're building on top of. It's a bit like somebody sticking a cherry ontop of a free cake then trying to charge for it.
This is why a lot of people just go down the consultancy route. I imagine Matt Holt will be better off simply from being the author of a famous project.
Don't get me wrong though, if the project can monetise Caddy, all power to them.