Monetization

[turtle0x1]

hi 👋

This is going to be an evolving thread, I like to think aloud

This project started in early 2018 & first released publicly on Github - 29th dec 2018

Trying to keep up with an ever changing LXD requires a large amount of time on my part.

At time of writing im on the verge of releasing 0.11.0 which introduces project access restrictions & LDAP integration.

I love open source and have no plans on taking this program closed source but as time goes on its obvious I will need to find some source of finance to ensure its continued development.

So far I can think of the following options

• Data harvesting & selling
  • Im sure somebody would pay to know about your containers & VMS (this is by far my least favourite option)
• Run a hosting company
  • I think AWS & OVH have enough % of the market to make this not worth the time
• "Donations"
  • Im not really about begging for $20 a month, this is an application not a framework / javascript library
• A server tax
• Sponsored Issues
• Selling support
  • I have a full time job, I cant really support someone mid day on a complex issue
• Ads
  • Please, no ads its not worth it

Community input on this issue would be nice and I would love to here from companies that use LXDMosaic but at the end of the day I guess I will have to make the final decision - which a time of writing is looking like a server tax.

A yearly server tax ($100~) for every server after X number of servers is probably not unreasonable, it may even generate enough income to support full time work on the project!

For some comparison

• Proxmox charges up to $1000~ a year per CPU socket, excluding the community option $100 a year would make me $900 cheaper per server (this would of course have to exclude support LXD itself, proxmox is more of a complete virtulization package)

• Vmware - lol the most expensive thing since sliced bread

[turtle0x1]

The gitlab-ee license looks like a good place to start thinking about how to draft a license for this project

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/ee/LICENSE

there may be some contributions where the authors hold copyright under GPLV3, the main consideration being the API key code for node that was written by somebody else.

The API key code isn't great (my bad) so we may have to look at moving to JWT

Also may have to ask users to forgo copyright claims surrounding any future submissions