Just about a month ago the Radical Breeze apps were made free. The goal being to try and fund their continued development via donations.
The results were… less than ideal. In fact, there have been a total of 3 donations to date. Obviously this isn’t exactly enough to fund development of any kind in a realistic way.
At this point I have proven to myself that substantial development can be funded via a “shareware” style model for Linux applications. Perhaps not “gonna make us all mega rich” levels of funding, but certainly enough to cover costs and make it doable.
Here’s the thing:
At the current rate of donations, not only does the development progress need to almost completely cease (as it is not enough to cover more than, say, one hour of time) but it no where near covers other costs (simple things like hosting fees, hardware, etc.).
Prior to switching to the donation model, enough sales were happening on a regular basis to make it reasonable to have a fairly rapid stream of updates with new features and bug fixes.
It’s all a mater of logistics and basic practicality. If you are a professional software developer as a day job, with a house and a family… you simply do not have time to code anything beyond the most trivial of projects in your spare time.
In order to accomplish something like this, a developer needs to choose between tasks. Mow the lawn… or fix a bug? Spend time with the family… or add a small feature? Some of this can be handled if there is some form of income available (for example: Software brings in money, so hire someone to mow the lawn. Or maybe it brings in enough income that a wife or husband can stop working their job to do more things around the house to free up time).
So.
At this point I feel somewhat satisfied that I have an idea of what is possible and likely with a few various business models in relation to Linux-specific software development (based on my experiences so far combined with feedback from many of you and observations of the results of others in related endeavors).
But I enjoy development. And I like these applications, and want to continue the development goals that I have planned for them.
Here’s what’s happening:
- All applications are back to being commercial and are going to stay closed source for the foreseeable future.
- The price of RadicalCodex, Radical Comic Designer and DoThisNow are now all just $10. Simple. Affordable.
- Those three people that donated? I’ll get you guys licenses to all of the apps. You guys are awesome and definitely deserve a bit of a high-five. If you find yourself in the greater Seattle area, the first beer is on me.
- To get things properly kick started again, I’ll be rolling out some feature upgrades to all three applications.
This has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride, and now it’s timet o settle down, set the business model in stone, and just focus on a steady stream of updates.
June 26th, 2009 - 12:16 am
Those of us who purchased licenses before the “free” era will still be getting the new updates and features, correct?
I think this all makes sense, and I completely agree with you and feel you’re making the right decision, for what it’s worth.
June 26th, 2009 - 12:27 am
Oh of course!
Anyone who purchased previously has the same registration going forward.
June 26th, 2009 - 12:48 am
This is definitely the way to go.
June 26th, 2009 - 4:33 am
I’m glad that pre-free-era purchasers will still enjoy updates. I missed seeing “Registered to: X” after updating to the free version.
June 26th, 2009 - 4:38 am
I’d be curious to know how much you earn monthly keeping it closed source, although I am all for open-source software, its not practical for small companies. I feel as it stands now, people are not going to donate to something that isn’t a critical piece of software to them, and your software, is not critical to many people, and therefore your not going to get a lot of donations, even if it was 100,000 peoples favorite piece of software, I doubt you would get enough donations to live on. I demo’d most of RadicalBreeze’s software while it was open source, and not to be mean, but I wouldn’t pay for any of it, but as I said, its not critical to me, if you wrote a really nice multi-language IDE for linux, I would easily donate for it, because that is relevant to me, but back to my original point, as it stands now your software is useful for a very small selection of people, and an even smaller amount of those people are willing to pay anything for it.
Regardless, good luck with all future projects!
-Abe
June 26th, 2009 - 8:35 am
I gave it a quick test.
1. segfaults with SELinux enabled
2. sometimes throws NilObjectExceptions (easy to reproduce)
3. couple of other crashes (easy to reproduce)
But otherwise it worked ok and seemed to be pretty convenient way to read e-comics.
June 26th, 2009 - 10:09 am
There is a more advanced open source alternative to RadicalCodex - Calibre ( calibre.kovidgoyal.net ).
June 26th, 2009 - 10:56 am
@bypasser:
Looks good. Of course it’s clear that the open source versions should be used and help to improve them.
I have used Comix: http://comix.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
June 26th, 2009 - 3:07 pm
Abe: I actually went into more of the details about a month ago on how well it worked as commercial applications. It is possible to make a living off of these applications… though just barely.
Justin: What distro are you running? I definitely want to fix any problems like you describe (and I really don’t doubt at all that you are seeing them), I just need to know where to start looking. My primary distros for testing are Ubuntu 32bit, Ubuntu 64 bit and OpenSuse 32bit (as those three are, by far, the most common in terms of web visitors and downloads).
bypasser: Calibre is… interesting. It has a lot of AWESOME features. However I find the UI to be borderline unusable (not to mention ugly) and many of the features simply don’t function.
June 26th, 2009 - 7:51 pm
@Bryan: “What distro are you running?”
32-bit Ubuntu 8.04 with SELinux. I have Fedora 11 at work but I have not tried with it yet.
June 26th, 2009 - 9:55 pm
@Bryan
Have you tried 0.6 beta ( http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=48459 )? It seems all the features work there. And GUI is just a matter of taste.
@Justin
Shouldn’t you be using AppArmor with Ubuntu?
June 26th, 2009 - 11:47 pm
Justin: SELinux might be the culprit. I’ll take a look there as I’ve not done any real testing here with the combination of Ubuntu and SELinux (which causes a lot of problems with a lot of various applications I’ve noticed).
Bypasser: I’ve been using the current beta of Calibre (gotta stay current with the competition, after all!). It is… interesting. It has some very cool features that I’ve been planning for RadicalCodex… but many of them are quite buggy (to the point of not really being usable). And the UI… sure… that’s subjective. But if you look at the difference between, say, Windows 3.1 and KDE4… just saying. Some people might like Windows 3.1 too.
June 27th, 2009 - 10:20 pm
CHECK THIS OUT
This is an essay by an FSF intern, which reads scarily like someone inducted into a cult:
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/sarah-mcintire-introduction
June 28th, 2009 - 9:20 am
hi bryan, i dont want to start a flamewar, i found a link to this in linuxhaters…
i just want to give my opinion:
open source is for big companies.
You have seen it, people dont like to give money, so donations will not usually be enough and no one likes working from free.
im happy to see that you considered “shareware” or something like this.
best regards
June 29th, 2009 - 10:36 am
Just a comment about the pricing of your apps.
Besides the fact that you should upgrade your “commercial Linux software” page with the new pricing of your applications, have you realized how does the price you are asking for your applications ($10) compares to the price of say, a full blown game like “World of Goo” selling at $20? (3 people working on it, including a “designer”)
June 29th, 2009 - 9:03 pm
Well, whatever floats your boat. And good luck on it. With that being said, I have a feeling that your downloads increased because a lot of people (like me), just wanted to demo it. After trying out your product, I actually didn’t find it very good. I’m sorry if that offends you, but it was really slow and buggy. Also, radical comic designer had a very difficult to use UI. (it was managable because it was so small, but don’t even think of scaling it in it’s current condition).
June 29th, 2009 - 9:56 pm
oh man.
so, I just tried out Calibre. That user interface… holy crap. Wildly different that anything else I’ve used. Feels completely alien.
July 3rd, 2009 - 12:20 pm
Sorry to hear that it didn’t work out for free. When it was free, I downloaded DoThisNow as I liked the concept behind it. However, I have to say I consider it an early beta. I agree with TBOL3 an xtracto: It still is not that little money for a somewhat buggy app.
Also, I think it is far too early after one month to abandon the open source model (I fully understand your financial reasons, though). If they were open source, your apps could - ideally - get better in shorter time and start to attract some more attention. Then some business model might emerge from that (but even middle class oss-projects like miro or songbird have or have had that problem).
Again, 10 $ are not much but still too much for something you don’t really need and even if you did, it wouldn’t work like it should.
However, if you are going write an easy to use, semi-automatic frontend for sane, ocropus and unpaper, I’d gladly buy it for 30 bucks. The same goes for a decent pdf-editor for Linux. Or even just a viewer with the ability of permanent annotation. Check out ubuntu brainstorm and 100-papercuts to get some inspiration. I am sure there are a lot of annoing things that one developer alone could solve and that people would pay for. (Probably more likely to be found in the business-ish categories)
(e.g. rainlendar: small app, but fills a need, is stable, looks good.)
So, just fill an exiting need with your work or create a need that wasn’t there before.
August 29th, 2009 - 7:21 pm
Bryan,
I just downloaded RadicalCodex without paying. I don’t think I was supposed to be able to do that.
-jj