Well it isnāt about just paying one guy to do security fixes. It is about providing a model to earn for Nextcloud so we can pay people to improve itā¦
We want to develop Nextcloud, add features, make it better. But nobody will ever pay for that directly because what we do is open source. Nobody pays us for the features we add, that requires licensing. That would be consulting and we canāt develop a product that way (nobody can). Instead, we need a model like Red Hat has: you pay for support (patches, LTS etc) and services (3rd level help desk, essentially). That then pays for development. RH keeps a lot of the documentation behind closed doors and has a āenterprise editionā (RHEL) and, indeed, 3rd level support. They donāt support Fedora for more than 6 monthsā¦ Of course you can get longer support via CentOS but that is never as official or secure as the āreal dealā - no guarantees.
So if we follow that model we stop publishing most of our documentation and support only for one release. We donāt really want that - would make a lot of people unhappy, including us. But we will have to see if it is possible to keep not doing that. I know quite a few companies, universities etc that simply tell us: I have no need to pay you, your forums and documentation are excellent! Well, thanks for the compliment, but we have to stop developing software if everyone does that
Hey, no disaster, we are still hiring etcetera, but we want to grow to a 500 people company so we have to find ways to for example get an average of 80% of the companies with more than 500 users that use our product to pay, ideally in a way that is nice, not evil. Because if we only get 10% to pay we can not develop Nextcloud anywhere near as fast as we could with 80%ā¦
I [quote=ātflidd, post:20, topic:2508ā]
Another option could be crowd-funding: Letās suppose that NC provides a 12 month support, then each additional year costs e.g. $1000 (cheapest subscription is 1900 ā¬). Would there be enough people that the contribution of everyone is acceptable?
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Well it of course doesnāt cost Eur 1000, it cost waaaay more. And again - factor in the cost of actual development.
Letās just make a simplified calculation. We now have about 30 people on the payroll. Letās assume they earn 60K/year. So we need 1.8 million per year right now to break even. And that is not including travel for meetings, going to conferences, sponsoring community members, doing marketing or sales, paying for our servers or anything elseā¦ A more realistic number is closer to 3 million. And remember, we want to grow, hire more people and speed up development.
You see any way to get to that amount of money with home users? I donāt
Just calculate. 6K newsletter subscribers we have. Say each pays 100 euro each year (not that that will ever happen, right?). How much is that? A tiny start at best
Fact is - we need to focus on businesses, as they can afford to pay for development. After all, they sponsor Microsoft and Apple and many others