Hi Peter,
I had thought about this long ago. Could there be a way to monetize wfview? It’s certainly worth money, I don’t think anyone doubts that it is. And I do get requests via email all the time for methods to donate (and this is why we have Patreon now – and thank you for your support there, Peter).
The thing is though, if we were to add premium features such as advanced audio processing, 3D waterfall, dual VFO, who knows what else, these features would add to wfview, and I’d want them part of the same open source product. If I were to keep them separate, I might as well make wfview shareware. The more we work on wfview, the more apparent it has become that there is so much benefit in making and keeping it open source. I’ve actually got 5 or 6 “pull requests” on gitlab right now for things ranging from optimizing the build system to minor spelling errors. This is something we could not do (or at least, not as easily) if we had to maintain a secret closed-source fork for premium subscribers.
And then there’s our team. We’re all already full-time employed with jobs. Many of us have young families. We are literally tapped out on what we can actually put forth for working on wfview. wfview is a sort of “labor of love” right now that we all enjoy so much that we can’t help but work on it here and there when we get a few hours to ourselves.
Realistically, if the community wanted to directly fund specific features, we would do something like a kick starter, raise a significant amount of cash, and take a month of unpaid leave to knock it out. I’ve thought about this, and it may happen some day. The results would remain open source, the community would benefit and grow, new ideas would sprout (and old ones would ferment!), and we could repeat the process again and again.
I’ve no desire to return to the “dark ages” of MSDOS shareware that held older hams back from making their code truly “live” in our hearts and minds. You can look at Sheldon Shallon’s W6ELProp program for an example kind of close to home to me. I’d love to maintain it, but the source code was never released and thus it’ll simply slowly die. Or look at Roy Lewallen (W7EL… what is with these callsigns?) who made EZNEC. A great, fabulous program that has done a lot of good in the industry and in our hobby. But he is making it free and closed-source now. It’ll die a slow, painful death. Nobody will be able to maintain it, to port it to Linux or newer version of windows – who knows what people will be dealing with on desktops in the next few years. Free and closed-source is not future proof. It’s a great program that has, right now, no foreseeable future as there cannot be a maintainer, and software should be maintained for its user base. Perhaps I’m digressing a bit here…
On the other side of the coin, we’ve got excellent software like fldigi, CHIRP, hamlib, Gqrx, gnuradio… the list goes on and on. These programs have grown out of the love of their users and developers, and have become staples in our hobby. I’ve never spent a cent on any of them, although I have done some pull requests.
I’m sure if you stick around, you’ll see the sun set on the old generation of must-have closed-source ham radio apps like HRD, winlink, echolink, and EZNEC. (All great programs in their own right, don’t get me wrong!) You might think I’m kidding, but the writing is on the wall.
Bottom line, we may one day ask directly for funding for specific features. But we will have to earn that right by cultivating a community of users that are basically begging for it, and with a good track record on our side to back it up. I’ve also thought about selling pre-loaded Raspberry Pi boxes as little “rig servers”, but the thing with this is, I have no time to do it, and what time I have is better spent adding features than making a few bucks selling computers. Maybe one day we will complete our iOS and Android ports and sell them in the app store for $5 as a way to boost team morale – but keeping the code open source at the same time.
This community of practice you see here grew exponentially out of the most improbable meetings of four people with similar ideas and ambitions. We’ve now got thousands of users from every corner of the globe. We want to see that continue.
Thank you to everyone reading here for your continued support,
–Elliott
de W6EL