Thanks to @dimitribouniol and @glacials, we're much closer to the next Cork release! I was finally able to implement the first version of a self-compiled check, which was the only requirement left for the next release.
As promised, both Dimitri and Ben will be getting either a free Cork license or the cash equivalent, as well as a special shoutout in the contributors sections once the feature is fully implemented.
@davidbures I think the pricing model for #opensource software wherein the compiled version is a one-time purchase but people can compile it themselves is smart. However, I imagine this isn't possible with interpreted languages like #Python and #JavaScript.
If you couldn't charge for compiled versions of Cork, how else would you monetize it whilst keeping the code open source?
@slashtechno That's a very difficult question to answer, and I struggled with answering it for a long time. For context, I have been part of the OSS community for ~ 15 years
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a nice answer. Open source software is impossible to make sustainable, which divorces it from the material reality we live in
Ideally, there would be people who would donate to keep the development going
If I couldn't monetize Cork this way, I'd probably just close the source
@slashtechno I used to develop a completely OSS app called TBX Scope a few years ago, and the reality is, even though I had around three thousands users, only one person ever donated. And that donation was 2€.
So this is why I think that pure OSS is just impossible to make sustainable in our material reality. It's a good idea, but it's an idea created for a perfect world that we unfortunately don't live in.
@davidbures@slashtechno for example, as an individual, I would opt-in to donate a humble amount of 1€/month (or little more) for each machine I have #NixOS installed on, and have it distributed between NixOS maintainers and developers of all packages I use.
It is a small and affordable amount for an individual. But, there are thousands of users, and companies could donate more, and this would generate nice monthly income in total.
This is applicable to any #Linux distribution, though.
@kravemir@davidbures@glacials My latest project is a way to interact with LLMs via email.
I'm thinking about offering a rate-limited version where people can email example@example.com and get a response generated. I feel like this is more of a novelty and in its current state, not something people would pay for. Yet, it costs money to pay for LLM APIs. In this case, I feel like the only way to sustainably offer a hosted version is by giving people who pay extra features to fund free access.
One solution I can think of is to have a state where if there is not enough money being made, when a free user tries to generate a response, they’d instead get an email saying something like “due to a high volume of requests, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid plan to keep getting answers” (I bet there’s a better phrasing though)
@davidbures@kravemir@glacials How do you manage payments for Cork? I recently created a GitHub sponsors profile and am thinking about providing access with x number of tokens per month under a certain sponsorship tier. If someone is not a sponsor, their response is processed on Ollama running on a Raspberry Pi instead of through an API which I have to pay for. However, GitHub sponsors is not made for powering subscriptions.
@slashtechno@kravemir@glacials I use Stripe for processing payments, as well as registering licenses. You need to put in your email when buying the app, and then I use that email to verify licenses.
I used to use GitHub sponsors, but I ran into massive limitations. What I’d recommend is to use an automation system like n8n to react to webhooks that Stripe sends to add users, then also using a different n8n workflow for the verification (which is also what I use) (2/3)
You can hit up the n8n workflow every time the user tries generating something, the workflow will then check a database for the relevant user info (like the number of tokens) and maybe even generate the response. Then, you can use another workflow to update the database.
That’s about an overview of what I’d do 🤔 Tell me if you have any other questions 😊 I’m far from an expert though (3/3)
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