Request for Comment: Open-Source Software Paywalls / DocPad Paid Subscriptions / @balupton goes on open-source software strike

Currently Bevry (our open-source community) earns $0.52USD/week from Gratipay donations, and also received $6000USD at the start of the year by the wonderful Hybris (thank you), coming to around $6500USD for the past 12 months (weekly donations were a bit higher before Gratipay v2.0) — this amount turns out just isn’t enough to live productively, and just isn’t enough to work on a projects that demand a full-time workload. A change is required.

A little bit of history of what has worked and what hasn’t. Bevry created two very popular and involved open-source projects; History.js and DocPad. Over the recent years, our focus has been solely on DocPad. DocPad has been around for 4 years now. In 2011 DocPad was a personal side project for myself with DocPad getting a few hours of attention a month, in 2012 DocPad and its associated projects were used in few consulting gigs getting a few hours a week, in 2013 DocPad was sponsored at $6000USD/month by the amazing Myplanet (thank you) and got a full-time workload, in 2014 the income disappeared so I went moneyless to see if that could work which it more and less did although it did decrease the investment into DocPad to a few hours a month — it turned out that moneyless living (at least for me) requires a lot of time for finding shelter, finding food, etc as well as eliminates any chance to obtain items of scarcity such as computing equipment/services to work productively like a phone that isn’t generations old or even a domain name renewal, or the right consistency and quality of food and shelter for a good consistent baseline of health — perhaps I can write about this sometime so other people interested in moneyless living can learn a balanced perspective, particularly around the role of scarcity and abundance including the commonplace abuse of each by society and individuals.

It is now near the end of 2015, and I’m tired of this. I’m tired of an endless stream of unpaid requests from users. I’m tired of having created two incredibly popular open-source projects (DocPad and History.js) that demand full-time workloads and 183 node.js packages that demand occasional maintenance, that don’t provide enough income to cover their investments. This wouldn’t be that weird if it was just myself using these, but these projects aren’t even small deals, these are projects used by Microsoft, Basecamp, GitHub, 37Signals, and so on — in internal projects as well as projects that reach millions of users each day. These are projects that deserve more attention than I can afford to give them.

In 2015 I shutdown Bevry the company which provides me with legal protection because I simply couldn’t afford the accounting anymore. In 2014 I wrote “Surviving Free Culture” a story of the strain open-source has on the mental health of the maintainers. I’m tired of this being a problem.

But Ben, come on, why don’t you just distribute the workload of these projects across many independent company employees? That’s an option when that’s an option, but it isn’t always applicable for these reasons:

1. Splitting the breadth of an entire project over several people requires the breadth of the entire project to be understood through several people. This isn’t always feasible to do during the initial phases of a project (it doesn’t really make sense to decouple a project before a project’s coupling is even established) and it isn’t always possible during later phases of a project either (as it could require an exorbitant amount of unpaid time to do the decoupling) — these factors make up DocPad’s case.
2. History.js however is already as small as sensible, breaking it up further would hinder efforts to understsand it. Many people understand it, however maintenance of it is incredibly time intensive, as testing it takes a lot of time and understanding and merging pull requests including debugging issues from many people from different use cases and companies takes another exorbitant investment of time that just isn’t possible unless done full-time and paid.

Ok Ben, but what about other business models like:

• Premium Prioritised Development: We’ve offered prioritised development (where development gets sponsored and prioritised) over the 4 years of DocPad being around. This has been requested twice, and proceeded once to $2000USD from it over the 4 years of DocPad’s existence. It’s just not enough.
• Premium Prioritised Support: We’ve offered prioritised support for History.js and DocPad since their inception, as mentioned in their READMEs and on the DocPad website. This has been requested once, and proceeded for $40USD. It’s just not enough, plus ideally everyone should get great support as the sooner a documentation or app improvement is made to fix the support issue, the less support issues around the problem will arise in the future.
• Premium Prioritised Trainings, Workshops, Online Courses, etc: These have been suggested as options, but never booked — indicating there just isn’t enough demand.
• Premium Features: This is something we originally planned, but as Eben Molgen’s argues and in Marco Arment’s Overcast 2.0 business model announcement demonstrates — having most of your users stuck with an inferior app because they won’t pay or are unable to pay, doesn’t make sense in terms of competition or empowerment.
• Crowdfunded Milestones: We have considered this but there just hasn’t been anyone so far to put their hands up to support this so far. If there turns out to be demand for this, we can evaluate it further.

Ok Ben, but come on, of course investing more time into something than your business model affords you is how debt is created and burnout and bankruptcy occur, just abandon the projects if they aren’t worthwhile and do something else. Completely correct, and that sucks, as I said before, these projects deserve attention, they are big deals! One would have thought that donations or sponsorship would work considering their reach and impact, but even after considerable investment into promoting those options over the years, they just aren’t working — and that haunts me, it haunts me that each day people use these projects often in high-profile use cases, each day people tell me all about the potential for these projects, each day the demand for these projects increase, each day the amount of requests for changes and support increase, each day their impacts on the wellbeing of the world increase, and each day their possibilities increase — however there just aren’t any funds to sustainably meet that demand without increasing psychological and financial debt to myself — and this isn’t even a problem unique to Bevry’s open-source initiatives, it’s a problem for many open-source projects and maintainers of which I’m familiar with and I’m sure even more that I’m not familiar with, a fact that haunts me even more so.

So I’ve reached a point, where I’m not going to let that happen anymore.

I’m going on open-source software strike.

From now on, I’m only going to invest time into open-source under the following conditions:

1. It is for my own benefit
2. It is paid by someone else for their benefit

I am no longer going to:

1. Work for free for someone else’s benefit and not my own

However, considering the current climate of donations and sponsorship, this means that effectively I quit my open-source maintenance, as $0.52USD/week doesn’t really afford much time to support full-time projects. Which sucks. So in order for that not to happen, in order for those projects such as DocPad to get the maintenance that they deserve, I have a proposition for DocPad that I would like your feedback on.

Here it is:

1. DocPad will become paid software.
2. This will probably be accomplished via paid subscriptions. Implementation, structure, and pricing is still to be determined and feedback welcome. Perhaps something like $500USD/user/year or $1000USD/site/year (5 users working on 1 site, will mean you can either pay $2500USD/5-users/year or $1000USD/site/year).
3. There will probably be some trial mechanism like a 30-day trial.

But Ben, what about all the years of your evangelising that money and closed-source software are immoral? Eben Molgen’s case is still sound to me, so I’ve thought a lot about this and believe I’ve come up with a decent enough solution:

1. DocPad will remain permissively open-source licensed.
2. There will be a pirate mode introduced to DocPad, accessible via a `--pirate` flag added to the CLI and options of DocPad, it will let DocPad run the same as purchased, with some caveats with details as follows.
3. The pirate mode will output a message like the following, which captures the spirit of this mode: I understand you may not have the ability or desire to financially contribute back to this project so the maintainers can afford the ability to feed themselves and the time to improve the software, so perhaps instead you could offset that cognitive dissonance by contributing some time to improve the project or by considering this unrelated yet perhaps more important set of data http://balupton.com/v
4. The pirate mode will generate the website with a non-visible indication that it was generated using the pirate mode, probably something like changing the meta generator content value from `DocPad v6.78.3` to `DocPad v6.78.3 (Pirated)`
5. Usage of the pirate mode will be reflected in the usage statistics. Our Privacy Policy already indicates that usage statistics will only ever be visible outside of Bevry and the necessary 3rd-parties required to provide the usage statistics to Bevry.
6. There may or may not be a public shame list on the DocPad website of live websites that were published with the pirate mode. I’m unsure how I feel about this at this, keen for feedback on this.

So this is all pretty crazy so far, so here is the reasoning for how this all makes sense, at least to me:

1. The beauty of commercial software is that the business receives money directly for what the users are actually using, which is incredibly sustainable: it is good for the business as they are encouraged to spend their time working on what pays for their time, and is good for the user as their payment encourages the business to focus on what they paid for. There are no conflicts of interest where the money earner is what a minority of users actually use (premium features) or something that none of your users actually use (advertising), requiring and perhaps even encouraging business investment into something conflictual to the interests of the majority of the users. Investments into the product can be proportionate to the value of the product to its users — a lot of users means a deservably lot of investment into the product, a small amount of users means a deservably small amount of investment.
2. The beauty of the commercial and pirate mode, is that it provides an ethical default case for the flow of the product. If you are a business using DocPad for profit, you now have a moral responsibility to pay for the software — if it is reasonable for you to purchase it, then it means you should, however if it is not reasonable for you to purchase it then you can pirate it instead — whether you do or you don’t is up to you, you remain empowered either-way, however this clearly establishes a default workflow and a moral responsibily — establishing both the shoulds and shouldn’ts while enabling the cans and can’ts.

The reasoning for why do this verse quit or continue as is:

1. This is the only way I am currently aware of that can provide the necessary sustainability for DocPad to accomplish its full potential and get the time its impact deserves. For DocPad users, imagine a paid team of people working on DocPad full-time (scaling to the income), providing great documentation and support, videos, trainings, conferences, incredible performance and speed improvements (minutes to seconds), and all the rest indicated on the Bevry roadmap on our zero donations so far Patreon.
2. If I don’t do this: things will continue unsustainably, that is to say I will incur psycholohical and financial debt for working on my open-source initiatives, leading me to quit open-source or end up in a ditch.
3. If I do this and it works: we get a model that can sustain development of DocPad and its associated open-source projects in a way that empowers everyone while making business/financial/psychological sense. And if it works, it could even be scaled to other open-source projects suffering the same issue if feasible, of which there are many.
4. If I do this and it fails: then at least I tried, and we know yet another business model that doesn’t work for open-source, which leads to me trying to find something else.

Thanks, keen to receive your feedback. Especially:

• Do you consider this proposal a good or bad idea? Why so?
• Will you leave the DocPad project if this proposal is implemented? If so, why? If not, why not?
• Are there any changes you would like to see made to this proposal? What are they?
• Would you consider this proposal beneficial or detrimental if implemented for your own open-source projects? Why so?
• Do you have any other feedback or suggestions?
• Do you have any encouragement?