Make commercial and open source work together

[SeanBannister]

Hi, I was really disappointed to see Harmony go closed source, I'd been working on some commits for the project and had further plans to contribute.

Could I suggest an alternative model which many projects have taken, keep the project open source but charge for the compiled version. People who aren't developers won't know how to compile it and therefore will buy the software. Those who are developers will either buy it for ease of use or compile and be even more likely to contribute because they have the dev environment setup, Synergy is a great example of this working.

[vincelwt]

Hi!

I longly hesitated with closing Harmony sources and I do believe that your idea would be the best compromise, but the main problem I see is everyone is free to just compile it and redistribute it, and thus there wouldn't really by any advantages for users to buy a license. The thing is, contrary to Synergy for example, Harmony is still a small project, and not a lot of people know about it. I'm afraid that it will end up with very few people actually buying it and the project ending up barely maintained like it was before.

That could however be a thing to experiment over a few months period to see if there's an actual demand for non-free music player.

I'd love to hear more people's thoughts on that especially from developers who actually tried the opensource/paying binaries model.

[SeanBannister]

I certainly understand the need to make money and maintain the project, would be amazing if you found a business model that worked with open source, but understand if you can't. This might be an interesting read.

The reason I'd originally downloaded Harmony was I wanted to hack my music player like I do with Atom IDE. It was less about the current feature set and more about my ability to add what I needed. And I hadn't realised so few people had contributed, I just had a look at the commit log.

I've been developing a remix search engine and was busy trying to integrate it into Harmony. I'd also started to integrate Wavesurfer. Just frustrating timing for me as I'll need to look elsewhere. but thanks for your work up to this point.

[vincelwt]

I totally understand you.

About your remix engine, the services plugins are still open-source and you can still create your own. The repo is here. I however still haven't integrated this repo with the rest of Harmony, but this is planned.

Another idea would be to open Harmony to plugins, in a more general form. Not only services plugins, but the possibility to customize Harmony as you want with plugins. It would however be a huge work, and I have no idea where I could start.

[vincelwt]

Due to the fact that I'm getting involved in more and more projects, I'm considering open-sourcing Harmony back, at least for a while to see if the model is viable. That'd require to clean up part of the code tho. I'll use the summer to think more about this :)

[SeanBannister]

I'm still interested and will be the first to commit :)