 So, one of the most common questions I get asked from people that are first learning about the free and open source software movements is these programmers and developers that have been developing proprietary software. They've been using the proprietary model forever, and now they're asking, hey, how can I switch over to selling open source software? How can I make money selling open source software? Because to them, it sounds impossible. And to many, it probably isn't possible. Many people probably can't make money selling open source software. The reason is not because of open source software, because in many cases, they're just not good at what they do. Nobody wants that piece of software, nobody's willing to pay for that piece of software. I mean, let's face it. Most people selling proprietary software, they're not successful, right? Because their proprietary software isn't any good, or at least nobody's willing to pay for it. But too many people want to blame the model. The business model. But let's answer this question, because even though I'm not a developer, I do have some thoughts on this from consuming a lot of free and open source software. Some of it paid. And I also have some experience with video content, although it's not software. All of my videos posted on YouTube and Odyssey, I license under a Creative Commons license, meaning it's free for you guys to do whatever the hell you want to do with my content. You guys can redistribute my videos and modify my videos and do whatever you want to do with my videos. I don't care. It is a CC-3.0 license with a CC-attribution-3.0 license, meaning you do have to give attribution to me, right? You should actually say, hey, DistroTube created this work. You could wink to where you found the original video. That's always good practice anyway. I mean, that's just common sense regardless of the license. And for the most part, you can do whatever you want to do with my videos, and I don't care. Why? Because it doesn't matter. Sharing my videos around, giving it to whoever doesn't affect me at all, doesn't affect my business plan at all. And I think that's the model that too many software developers, they kind of miss the point. They're so wrapped up in trying to sell the code, right? You can't sell code, not in open source software, because the whole point of open source software, when you license something under a free license, the code has to be public. 100% has to be public, which means you can no longer force people to pay for the code, right? Because anybody can go get the code. So you got to change the whole mindset of what you think about selling software. A good example of really good paid open source software is what Ardour does. Ardour is a digital audio workstation, open source. You can go to their website. Ardour.org. And if you want to get their latest software as a pre-built binary, what you do is you have to sign up for a membership on their site, pay them a few bucks, and then you get access to binary builds of their software. Otherwise, what you could do is it's open source software. The source code is available free on the internet. You can go find the source code and you can go compile it yourself. If you have the time and have the skills, and by skills, I mean it's not hard to compile software. Sometimes it can be lengthy to compile software depending on how large the program is. But I think that makes sense for convenient sake. Every piece of open source software should just offer binary builds to their customers if they're willing to pay for it. And I think that's what you need to do. Sell binary builds rather than selling the code, right? And another thing you do, especially if it's a complicated piece of software like Ardure that's going to require support, sell support, right? Sell support contracts. Years ago when Richard Stallman was first starting the free software movement back in the 1980s, one of the pieces of free software he'd helped develop was Emacs, Emacs, kind of a complicated piece of software, right? And how Richard Stallman made money and made a pretty good living at the time was he was actually selling physical media with Emacs on it, you know, floppies or whatever. You know, he would go ahead and write the floppies and then sell those floppy disks to people for money, right? Which is perfectly legal with free and open source software. You can sell floppies and CDs and DVDs or whatever. You can actually sell media that holds that software. You can make money with that software. The other way Richard made money on Emacs was with support, doing seminars and actually teaching people how to use Emacs. People would pay for him to come and actually teach about Emacs. And again, he made pretty good money doing that. He wasn't selling code, right? He wasn't selling the code for Emacs. He was selling all of this periphery stuff built around Emacs. And that's what software developers need to start transitioning to. One of the most common complaints I hear from people that sell software is they complain about piracy. They claim that the reason they can't make any money is because people steal their work, right? It's all the pirates fault. And of course, that's a cop-out and I'm being serious here. If you're one of these people, not just software developers but musicians, video content creators, people that write books, whatever it is, if you're complaining that the reason you're not making any money is because of pirates, you are basically trying to give yourself a cop-out, an excuse for what has been a failed venture on your part. Because guess what? The people that pirated your work, they were never going to pay for it in the first place. There's no way that you were ever going to make that kind of person actually go out and purchase your work. They were never going to do that. They may never consume your work if they have to pay for it. But they were definitely never going to buy it. So, you know, don't blame the pirates, right? And another thing, I think people would be happier if they licensed software or anything under free licenses, whether it be books or like I do with videos. If you license your stuff under free license, you never have to worry about piracy because you've basically given pirates the freedom to take your work, right? You no longer have to, you know, mentally, I don't have to get angry at people for stealing my work because they didn't steal it. It was given to them, right? And that's the beauty of this, right? Now I don't have anybody to, I don't have that cop-out, at least with piracy, right? That's one of those things in life. Years ago I learned, if you have a friend and this friend asks you to lend them money, never loan a friend money. If you loan a friend money, 90% of the time you're going to lose that friend because they're not going to pay you back, you're going to resent it, they're not going to be your friend anymore, or they're not going to pay you back. You're cool with it, but he's not cool with it because he knows he didn't pay you back so he avoids you all the time because he thinks maybe you're going to ask him to finally pay that money back. Never loan a friend money. And the reason I say this is if a friend asks you for money, give them the money and tell them, hey, this is a gift. I don't want you to pay me back. I don't care, right? And that's, it makes things a lot easier between you and that friend, right? There's no tension. There's no resentment, no negativity. And I think this is the same way with this piracy problem with proprietary software, you know, with free software, there's no resentment. You don't resent the pirates, right? Because you've freely given them your work. Now I can only talk about free software as far as developing free and open source software so much because, again, I'm not a professional developer. But let's take my video content. You know, I've made about 1200 videos in the last four and a half years or so. All of it under Creative Commons license, well, not all of it. There's some in the early days of the channel that were licensed under proprietary license on YouTube. Just because I didn't know YouTube had an option for me to actually change the license. You know, I thought YouTube actually forced a proprietary license on stuff that they published. They don't. You can actually, if you go into your YouTube settings, you can choose a Creative Commons license. I did that pretty early on in the channel's history. So almost all of my videos, including the one you're watching right now, if you go check the description of this video. You will see that at the very bottom of the description, it says license under ccattribution 3.0 and it gives a link on the web to where you can read the full license. And this has not caused me any problems at all. There's not a massive amount of people watching my content on the internet, on somebody else's channel on YouTube or any other video platform. Nobody is taking my work and putting it on their website and people are watching my work and you know, I'm not getting paid for it or whatever. That's not happening yet. There are people using my stuff, but it's such a small amount and it's the kind of people that would have probably ripped off my work anyway, right? These were people that were going to do something nefarious anyway. Now I don't have to worry about, you know, trying to get their stuff taken down. I don't have to worry about DMCA notices or lawyers or anything like that, right? I freely allow them to do this. But again, these weren't people that were actually going to do anything the right way anyway for the most part. And you know, these kinds of people, I like when people say, hey, I found this YouTube video, it's your YouTube video, but it's on somebody else's channel and they're trying to pass it off as their work. I go and their YouTube channel has like five subscribers. That video that they posted a year ago, one of my videos, had been up for a year and has 20 views, right? Their channel's probably not even monetized. Even if it was, you know, the ads that got served on 20 videos didn't even pay them probably a penny. I'm not even getting to get paid any real money. And by real money, I mean, if you want to make like $10 on YouTube, that video, you know, you need to have 10,000 views, 20,000, like it used to be a substantial amount of views. So these people, they're never going to get that because if they were able to get those kinds of views, you know, they would actually have to put in real work themselves. You can't go rip off somebody and get rewarded that way. So that's why I'm not worried about those kinds of people. That's why I don't care. Anything I do is always going to be licensed under free licenses. And I think you guys, if you're a software developer, yeah, go for it. Just get it out of your mind. You're no longer selling code, right? The code is there, you know, as a vehicle for you selling other stuff, whether that be those pre-built binaries, physical media with your software, support for your software, any kind of internet services related to your software, right? The software is just a way to get people to buy your other stuff. If that makes sense. Anyway, I've rambled on way too long here. Peace, guys.