In reply to Samuel "Otto" Wood.

Excellent read. In my experience the only issue I have with this is that basing revenues entirely on support can lead to a lesser quality product. If you give your product away for free and ask customers to pay for support then you have less incentive to do a great job of building an intuitive, stable product.

Competition helps mitigate that, but if everyone in the industry is also relying on support for revenue it leads to slower innovation, mature products that are no longer maintained because the creators can't afford to invest the time/effort to improve them, or (if you're lucky) a strong group of contributors who don't need to earn a living from the project.

I've recently acquired a project from someone that had moved very slowly due to their low-revenue support only model. I am now working on moving into a subscription model (as the author mentioned) that should hopefully provide incentive to produce an excellent product on the front end and sufficient support and enhancements after the customer has gained access. We'll see how it goes. :)

Thanks for sharing!