Today I have two polls for you. The project has started to take up quite a lot of time, which has increased the importance of the question of its monetization. To avoid making mistakes while trying different options, I first want to ask about your preferences.
В какой форме вам наиболее удобно присылать донаты?
2) Volunteering by individual authors and voluntary gratuitous development by commercial companies to “pay back society”;
3) A non-disclosure agreement, where compliance ensures continued cooperation and violations lead to a refusal to provide new content (for example, a cinema enters into such an agreement with a film studio and undertakes not to release the film during the first week of screening; in exchange, the studio provides the newest films, and if the agreement is violated, cooperation is terminated);
4) Network effect — a pharmaceutical company develops and tests a new drug, other companies naturally begin to produce generics, but the first company has already gained sufficient recognition for the safety and effectiveness of the drug; accordingly, people are more likely to trust their health to it than to an unknown (and potentially dangerous or useless) generic. The network effect applies to almost all inventions.
5) A desire to change the world for the better. For example, Elon Musk fundamentally decided not to patent his developments in the field of electric vehicles so that they would become mass-market faster due to competition.
6) Cross-subsidization — a company may fund the development of an intellectual product through the sale of a physical good, since this intangible product may indirectly increase the value or create advertising for the physical good. For example, a CNC machine manufacturer may release a free CAD, thereby increasing interest in themselves and the chance of machine purchases.
7) Advertising, product placement — do you think actors in movies accidentally open a can of Coca-Cola or Pepsi?!
Addition from Ancap-chan
Of course, the list of monetization methods is not exhaustive, and people are constantly inventing new opportunities. For instance, selling achievements like “dinner with the author” is not exactly crowdfunding, but the creation of a rare resource out of thin air for which people are willing to pay, while they are not willing to pay for text, video, or music.
The most brilliant monetization method, in my opinion, is selling merch. People pay for the high honor of wearing advertisements for their favorite author or, say, a company — is that not a miracle?
I wouldn’t want to look like a cobbler without shoes, so I hope to eventually implement something more interesting within my own project than simply publishing a bitcoin wallet for donations. Here, everything is complicated by such a fundamental condition as maintaining anonymity, which is why I haven’t bothered much with all these things until now.
I will be glad if you share your thoughts on project monetization with me. The easiest way, perhaps, is to do it through the same form that you use to ask questions. And, of course, send bitcoins. This is especially important if you’ve never had any — buy some to donate to me, and you’ll have some left for yourself. The downward trend seems to have ended, which means a price increase awaits us; don’t miss this opportunity.
Of course, other OSs exist, but Windows is much more popular than something like Debian. Moreover, as far as I know, this monopoly status is not supported by the state (quite the opposite), but arose precisely in the free software market.
анонимный вопрос
As I understand it, you are proposing to discuss Microsoft as an example of a monopoly that emerged and remains stable in a free market.
Indeed, Microsoft once created a very successful solution that significantly lowered the entry barrier for users into the world of personal computers, both due to ease of use and the fact that MS DOS was very undemanding of resources compared to the monstrous Unix. Then, a decent graphical shell was created on top of the system. Later, when software compactness became non-critical for most users, the company’s products responded in time and began to evolve toward expanding functionality and improving design. In general, skillful adherence to market incentives allowed the company to gain a good share of the desktop OS market. The accumulated network effect is such that individual failed products, like Windows Vista, are no longer capable of killing the company; a long series of bad decisions would be required for that. Nevertheless, such a thing is quite possible. For instance, Google’s browser dealt with Internet Explorer, despite its deep rooting in the system and its initially almost monopolistic position.
Of course, one could argue that the state supported Microsoft by pursuing pirates. If software monetization issues were left entirely to the producer, there would be fewer distortions. But this does not look like a factor that helps only Microsoft and not its competitors. So, in general, we can consider the market here to be free in a first approximation.
And how is this large company faring under free market conditions? It is having a hard time. In the shrinking market for PC operating systems, its share is consistently large, although far from 100%. It failed to really squeeze into the mobile OS market, where two other manufacturers dominate. Gaming consoles, augmented reality glasses, and many other products also haven’t quite taken off powerfully.
In other words, we see that all the horrors that political economy textbooks frighten us with regarding monopolies are not applicable to Microsoft: it cannot relax, hike up prices, and collect monopoly rent; it must, just like everyone else, diligently improve its products and maintain a flexible pricing policy so that even low-income clients prefer to buy Windows rather than pirate it — and yet, one by one, IT companies are surpassing it in capitalization.
Anyone can do whatever they want with their own property, but they cannot do whatever they want with someone else’s. I heard a little song from you, “putinhuylolalalalalalalala,” the tune got stuck in my head, and now I sing it too. If you start harassing me to make me stop singing it, or demand that I pay you royalties for singing, I will laugh at you, you senile fool, and walk away, humming the tune. Humming with my own mouth, that is, managing my own property, not yours.
But at the same time, one can imagine many scenarios in which I would still pay you money. You could sell me a ticket to a concert where you sing the song. You could sell me a T-shirt with a dickhead on it. You could suggest that we chip in to write a new song, for example, “hillarytoprisonlolalalalalalalala,” and I might like that idea…
As long as you invent ways for me to voluntarily part with my money to somehow partake in your intellectual property, you are a respected intellectual property owner. As soon as you start looking for ways to forcibly take money from me under the pretext that you thought of something and spent resources on it, you turn from a respected owner into a dangerous asshole.
