Business model for LVGL's editor

[kdschlosser]

@Ovestint1964

Your approach makes a lot of sense. It’s essentially about weighing upfront costs versus long-term flexibility and sustainability. Open source development, when incentivized properly (e.g., through bounties), can indeed attract skilled contributors who care about quality — sometimes even more so than traditional contract developers. Ownership of the final product also gives more control and reduces vendor lock-in, which is a major advantage for institutions like local governments. I think more public entities should explore this model — especially when transparency and adaptability are key.

That would be the point to doing it. The issue with buying something that is already made is the “maintenance” fees attached to buying that software. The hundreds of thousands of dollars that gets spent every year in support fees is completely off the wall. The business model of those companies is not to develop a complete bug free piece of software but instead to make software that has design issues built into it so they can sell the subscriptions for support. That is where their revenue stream is. There is no motivation to fix any bugs in the program because after all those bugs are what keep the support revenue flowing in. It’s a shady crooked business model that has been used for the last 30 years and that kind of business model needs to go away.

What do you think Microsoft makes more money on, selling Windows 11 or the revenue that is made from selling support for it? They make the most from all of the personal data they collect and resell but that’s a completely different issue all together.

There is no motivation to write quality software. There hasn’t been for a long long time and that is because of that crappy business model.

I will say this. If I owned a software company the single biggest requirement in order to get a job as a programmer would be to give the possible new employee an ESP32, or an STM32 and given a project to complete that can only be done if quality code is written. They have to get the software to work without any bugs or problems and it has to fit within the resources of the MCU. If they are unable or unwilling to do it (paid to do it) they would not be hired. There are far too many sloppy developers out there that just don’t care because the mentality is if there isn’t enough resources on the system the software is running on then the user needs to upgrade their system. So efficient code seems to have been pushed to the side. Code I write I always benchmark and check memory use and make tweaks to it to see if I can get it to run faster and to use less memory.

People that contribute to open source projects actually tend to write cleaner code and more efficient code. Reason why? Because most times it is right there where anyone and everyone is able to see it and critique it and also make suggestion on how to improve it. The only exception to that seems to be web browsers because almost all of them have memory leaks. I think the memory leak issue is more of an upstream issue with JavaScript.

There has been some really shady companies come up in the last 10 years that are flying under the Open Source umbrella but you cannot every get a copy of the source code. Not even if you buy into their support. You cannot download a copy of the compiled software either unless you pay for their support which then you get a username and password to the website where the software is located so you can download it. But it is marketed as Open Source. IDK how it is legal for them to do that but they do it.