From: "Mark Lanctot":
For regular consumer products, product updates and
bugfixes ARE free. Think of router firmware, for
example. No one charges for that. But on the
other hand, these aren't updated forever (a few
years at most), and few new features are added,
with new features being added to the next piece of
hardware and often finalized before release.
"Low-end" routers might have free updates (and few new features), but this
isn't the case with commerical routers. Commercial routers (like those from
Cisco, for example) are supported for many years, and generally get new
features at the same frequency as other new routers (unless the router is so
old that it doesn't have sufficient memory to store the new firmware).
To get these new features moving forward, you have to pay for it.
Security updates are free, but are also a "manual process" (i.e. more time
consuming for the customer).
My point is: There is a model today, at many companies, to add and update
features moving forward. But I know of no such company that does this for
free (other than Slim Devices, that is).
Open source can co-exist with a financial
structure, mostly in the form of donations at this
point.
As I said, I like the model that Slim users now.
The fundamental problem with donations: It is difficult to predict what
donations will come in. This, I think, would make it difficult to justify
the expense of additional staff to fix stuff - you never know if future
donations would be able to fund new staffing levels. I suppose you could
hire short-term contractors with some of those funds, but then the company
may develop "spotty" service (i.e. sometimes bugs are fixed quickly,
sometimes not, depending on contractors - and funds - available at the
time).
For open source projects that take donations, they generally use donations
for things like new hardware and stuff. I don't think the donations that
come in are all that great (in my honest opinion). I certainly don't think
they'd fund employees (which, with salary, benefits and the like, cost a
whole lot of money).
-- Jeff
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