As I said that's just another way of soliciting donations; it relies entirely on consumer goodwill (or ignorance/poor accessibility of the free option). There are limits to how big you can get with that (or how much you can charge) before someone just undercuts you with a fork.

I'm not saying it's impossible to survive with that model; lots of organization survive on donations. But you're not gonna be able to build the Free Software equivalent of Microsoft or Google on donations.

That said, I think doing that with business software is a particularly interesting case because it allows low level employees to justify running a donation through the regular software purchasing process without raising too many eyebrows if they care to. I've seen a few other projects with similar models.

It's nothing like donations: people pay these extensions / apps like any other paid software. That's my point, actually.

In XWiki's case, we know it's not perceived like "I could be having it for free but I'll pay anyway because it's a nice thing to do".

We do explain that our stuff is open source to our customers though. It's a selling point.

In our case, admittedly, it helps that our target customers want our support anyway.

> before someone just undercuts you with a fork.

Absolutely, it is a risk to take into consideration. Now, maintaining a fork has costs too, and someone doing this would rely on continued maintenance and goodwill from the upstream vendor as well.

Downstream vendors actually have an incentive to keep good relationships with upstream, so they can share fixes and have some guarantee that whatever they base their business on keeps being maintained.

> that's just another way of soliciting donations; it relies entirely on consumer goodwill (or ignorance/poor accessibility of the free option).

That's almost like saying that Netflix relies on the consumers' goodwill, since pirating is too easy. In reality, people pay for convenience in getting what they want.

The main reason Netflix is more convenient than piracy is that piracy is illegal. If The Pirate Bay was allowed to offer a $2/month unlimited movie streaming service with no legal repercussions, Netflix would be out of business.

Actually, piracy became rare exactly when Netflix became easy to use and not when the former became illegal (which it always was).

Hey don't discount the work that various actors did to make piracy less convenient as well. VPNs and upload caps, not to mention putting all the infrastructure and ops in place to force people to use them made piracy harder than it technically needs to be.