Sabu Francis & Associates

What is it?

A simple system of purchasing our software products whereby each purchase contributes to the well being of the larger community interested in the same software. Eventually, when we reach our assigned target revenue earmarked for the software, the software would automagically become free for everyone.

How does it work?

All our software would be fully capable for everyone right from day one. However, for those who haven't registered; the software would display "nags" at certain intervals and/or during some important activity in the software. This nag would display a gentle message requesting registration.

Once the user buys the software; not only would s/he get the software without the nags; but the frequency of these nags would be reduced for subsequent users. Once we make the stipulated amount of money from the software; we will release that version of the software as an open-source software. Subsequent versions of the same software may go through the same registration process. However, those who had registered an earlier version would get the later versions free.

Is this some kind of MLM -(Multi Level Marketing)?

No! This is NOT a pyramid scheme! We do not believe in incentivizing people to purchase our software only for commissions they would earn by selling it to others down the MLM pyramid. If someone decides to pay us more money than that we are asking for, then it should ideally because the software was worth it.

Nevertheless, we would appreciate if you can spread the word around regarding this approach in a "viral" manner!.

But why on earth?

Some may wonder why we should set an artificial limit to the amount of software we earn from our software. There are several downright sane reasons for it. For one; writing software happens to be a bye-product of what we do at our company. Our mission and profit motives are higher up on the Maslow ladder.

Another down-to-earth reason is that we have seen all too often creative people in software companies waiting at the till -- when they should ideally be moving on to other things. Incorrect reading of the market has destroyed many a creative mind. If they can face upto reality and know that some software of theirs are only worth so much, they may move further on earlier.

Estimating the final limit that we would like to earn from each software that we write is not a difficult task. We know how much has gone into it; and can be reasonble in allowing for a good profit for ourselves, some amount for the intellectual property present in the software and some amount for the support of the software. Beyond that, it is anybody's guess why a software should be over-priced. There are some more very persuasive arguments that are often spoken in the open-source community discussions and you could possibly look there for more clarity.

Then, why dont you make it fully open source?

The very fact that the open source movement and its ilk has gathered so much momementum does indicate that its presence would be felt for quite some time. Software as a pure "cathedral" driven money making system is no longer viable in the form such software companies used to work.

This does not mean that commerce has destroyed mankind's need to be nice to one another. We firmly believe that an appropriate amount of commerce is needed for one to sustain progress and innovation. That is one area where the open source movement have not been able to address fully. They seem to be saying "go free!" and nothing else would do. At the same time, they do agree that money could be made from open source software, but there is some lack of clarity on how that can be done in an altruistic manner. There has been several models attempted:

For e.g. Work on parallel commercial development along with open source: One is paid for and has more features/accountability/support. The other acts as the development bazaar where the features get tried, tested and debugged. The other business model for open source is to give the software free and charge for support, documentation, etc.

This is our humble attempt to introduce what we believe to be a more viable model -- where we first introduce a commercial version of the software and give a method for it to become open source. We can still retain the option of doing the same thing for subsequent versions (i.e. After version 1 of a software becomes free, version 2 would once again start off being a commercial one and would go through the same process before that too becomes an open source software ... and so on)