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Mozilla May Begin Offering Freemium Services in the Future

posted by Fnord666 on Friday October 13 2017, @06:54AM   
from the beginning-of-the-end dept.

Celestial writes:

CEO Chris Beard revealed in an interview with CNET that Mozilla may start offering "freemium" services in the near future:

There's another side as we start to look at products that we could potentially offer. Some of them start to look like services, exploring the freemium models. There'd be a free level always, but also some premium services offering.

That Yahoo! money has to run out at some point.

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Original Submission

• Paid-for open source Paid-for open source (Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday October 13 2017, @08:44AM (3 children)

  by pTamok (3042) on Friday October 13 2017, @08:44AM (#581646)

  I'd be happy to pay a reasonable amount for the continued existence of Firefox and Thunderbird, so long as they remained FLOSS. As Red Hat demonstrate, it is entirely possible to exist on service revenues. Maintaining and updating a large code-base to track Linux kernel changes, Windows changes, and other platform changes is hard; and distributing copies in a secure manner is a value-added service, and neither are cost free. The GPL only allows you to charge for distribution, and doesn't mention other services, which is a pity, considering that there are important FLOSS projects crucial to the Internet and many businesses that have difficulty in getting funding. There ought to be a way in which popular FLOSS software could get reasonable funding in proportion to its use without having to go down the proprietary licence route.

  It is unreasonable that programmers producing good quality FLOSS code are poorly rewarded, when dreadful code hidden behind proprietary licences gets heavily monetised.

  I do not have a proposed solution, as I understand it is a hard problem, especially if you wish to preserve FLOSS principles. I just feel the current situation is inequitable and leads to unstable projects.

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+2
  Insightful=2, Total=2
  Extra 'Insightful' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		3

• Re:Paid-for open source Re:Paid-for open source (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @09:32AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @09:32AM (#581663)

  As Red Hat demonstrate, it is entirely possible to exist on service revenues.

  And they prominently demonstrate the damage which gets done in pursuit of increasing those revenues: systemd

  Parent

  • Re:Paid-for open source (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @03:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @03:48PM (#581819)

    The internet changed from an experiment to capitalistic based economy worried about increasing shareholder value long ago.

    Look no further than google and facebook.

    Parent

• Re:Paid-for open source (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @12:57PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @12:57PM (#581717)

  donate, and tell others to donate.
  that's what I did with EFF and FSF.

  Parent