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The 'Everyone Gets the Source Code, Donations Get You Binaries' Software Model
TroysBucket writes "One developer who is trying to fund his development work via donations has taken on an 'Everyone gets the source code, donations get you binaries' business model, where he provides installers and binaries directly only to donating users. Quoting: 'A very central goal of everything I am doing, right now, is to show a concrete [and highly documented] way that other developers can fund their own FOSS work. With that in mind One major mistake I made, right off the bat, was that I provided very little direct benefit to people who donate (no “perks”).' Has anyone seen this work well before with other projects?"
The NeoOffice project (more-or-less OS X native port of OpenOffice; deliberately not providing a link here because the stunt pulled by the devs at the beginning of 2012 makes them weasels in my book) recently switched to an arrangement similar to this, except those guys are far worse than the developer in TFA (who is actually being perfectly reasonable, IMHO). Essentially, the donation in this case buys you the time savings of not having to compile yourself, and some measure of assurance that the binary is compiled as intended by the developer. And if you're OK with setting up the build environment, running makefiles, and taking the time to run the build, then great.
The Neo binaries used to be free. Somewhere around the end of 2011/beginning of 2012, without warning, they started requiring money for binaries of the new major-version release (3.2.x). They didn't bother to disable the update check in the latest 3.1.x binaries, nor to modify it to say something like: "NOTE: subsequent updates will be pay only." The weaselly thing is that they describe this as a "voluntary donation" -- no kidding. You can't download the binaries (nor post to most of the forums) without a donation. All of which would be only mildly annoying if the source, which is available via anonymous CVS and includes the makefiles, were actually possible to build by following the published instructions. Unfortunately, it isn't: quite a few people have tried (myself included), and all independently arrived at the same conclusion, which is that the source will absolutely not build as published. (Search the macosx-talk archives and see for yourself.)
In short, it seems quite clear that the Neo devs are deliberately doing the absolute bare minimum to satisfy the GPL requirements (and to be able to use a ".org" domain, which may have significant tax implications) -- maybe not even that. I suspect they know damn well that the source won't build according to the instructions, even if you follow them to the letter. "Disingenuous" doesn't even begin to cover it.
By comparison, the developer in this case is being very transparent and upfront with his reasons and intentions. Kudos to him!
--Tim