Everyone not first, but inspired by the first, is by definition a clone in some way. But here we're talking about how the ease with which a service can be both cloned and indirectly funded creates competitive pressure against a paywall.

Poverty means not being able to buy a lot of things. Is information special? Governments can always provide or subsidise important sources of information if they don't want the poor to suffer an advertising ghetto while the rich go ad-free (where ad-blocking is hard or unpopular or obscure). Most countries have public media organisations.

It depends on the value the site provides, and the difficulty of it being cloned. Top newspapers are doing quite well with digital subscriptions, and they don't even give subscribers an ad-free experience. And I'm amazed at the success with which free-to-play games sell cosmetic items — selling to susceptible kids helps here. Then there's the paid exclusive content and free lure model.

Also, companies like Apple and PayPal allow one to set up regular payments without anyone else getting credit card details or other data.

And yes, for certain services there are alternatives to ad revenue that don't require people to open their wallets.

Location of the SpaceX site: https://www.google.com/maps/pl...

Scraping and compiling the forecast and observation data is a good idea for evaluating a weather service's quality without having to get them to participate.

What about charging all users your best estimate of the average value they get out of your site, with a one-month trial?

Would your membership be decimated because few get much value from it, and could easily move to a competitor?

There are other potential solutions depending on the nature of your service.

Yes, the more novel the offering, the more people have to be told it exists, and be convinced to purchase.

Back in the 70s there was no social media to help spread the word, but many read newspapers and magazines. But these were mainly funded by advertising, and I doubt a PC company could have forgone advertising and relied on editorial to get the word out. The publications would have blackballed them for not buying ads.

Still happens today, but at least media is now more democratic.

Yes, ads in their proper context (trade mags, search results, classifieds, point-of-sale) are the best of the bunch. They still spin however, not telling you about any problems or worthwhile competitors. So such an ad can be worthwhile as inspiration for further research, or as a trigger for an evaluation purchase.

No, "build it and they'll come" doesn't often work well, though online word-of-mouth is making it work better than it has done before. You can still get steamrolled by competitors who do push their products in people's faces (hello "ambassadors" and "influencers").

Yes, all ads spin. Independent helpers are better. But in a free society ads will always be with us.

The best response is for the worst forms of advertising (door-to-door, consumer telemarketing, mass spam, intrusive ads embedded in media) to become so hated that they're ineffective, and to boost the availability of independent guides as a substitute for ads.

Does the German Google News still show snippets (e.g. first paragraphs) for non-paywalled articles? Since about a year ago, I see only headlines on Google News, which was a response to pressure from publishers to remove the snippets. That caused me to stop using Google News, and switch to Bing News. Now Bing News has gone the same way.

And yes, Google News includes paywalled articles, and no longer provides notice that they can't be seen without a subscription.

So both Google and Microsoft have already caved to publishers. I suppose they've now drawn the line.

I wish every weather service published a graph that showed the progress of the correlation between their 1 to 7 day forecasts and what actually happened, somewhat like the graph for hurricane tracks in the referenced article. Published confidence levels would also help to know how locked-in a prediction was.

My experience has been that forecasts a day or two ahead are amazingly accurate, but that you can't rely on forecasts a week out for scheduling an important event.

While I agree that debate chambers are boondoggles, made obsolete by technology, I'm all for shutting them down. If you want politicians to interact, have them attend a mess hall for lunch, where seating randomly changes each month. And if you want accountability, broadcast meetings held in offices, where the real decisions are made.

Licensing would be the least work for both end-users and developers if GitHub ran an "Open Software App Store" that accepted pay-licence fees from end-users, and distributed these to developers, both those in the fork and prerequisite trees, and within the packages themselves (based on a registered developer income share). I responded to GitHub's request for suggestions with just this, pointing out that it could earn them, like Apple and Google, income via an app store cut.

The wordiness of the DevWheels licence just formalizes all this app store functionality, so licensing can still proceed if a store isn't available, plus making sure that no store has a monopoly. I think it's better to put the burden of licensing the dev-chain on the developers themselves, rather than requiring end-users to get multiple licences. But the presence of the automated licensing of an app store makes both approaches equivalent.

And yes, some of the detail of the DevWheels Licence is what to do when you can't pay someone in the chain. Again, an OSAS could handle this smoothly, but the licence needs to be clear about what happens when there's no app store. DevWheels chooses to have end-users get licences from the directly-upstream packages when they are unable to get a licence for a package they want to use, with any licence fee increment by this package forfeited, and have developers do the same thing of moving one level up the tree when they're unable to forward a payment.

If a licence made the software open (source-available and freely-forkable), but also allowed contributors (both in-package and to downstream forks) to get a share of pay-to-run revenue, I see this attracting developers at least as strongly as an OSI-approved licence.

I totally agree with your concept of just charging for open software — JFC. Even though it violates the FOSS's Freedom 0 (the freedom to run), such a licence can still retain the real advantage of Open Source: being able to inspect and tinker with it yourself, so you can fix bugs and release improvements.

Check out the DevWheels Licence. It's like your PML, but includes a way for licence payments to be distributed to developers of upstream and prerequisite packages, which allows someone forking and adding value to get a share of the revenue, rather than all of it going to the owners of the original package.

DevWheels doesn't have your idea of using a hash to validate licence purchases. That would be useful to determine eligibility for either upgrade pricing or support. As you say, it doesn't matter that this wouldn't stop people running the software without paying. Everything can be cracked, open stuff more-so . One must rely on moral pressure, and also having the software do some minimal checks for the presence of a licence receipt, so piracy needs to be a conscious act of bypassing this.

Yes, paid support does have the big advantage of leaving everything open. However, because support and customization is so expensive, only a small fraction of the users can afford it, with the rest left to fend for themselves, often with bad docs. Also, paid customizations can lead the software in the direction of the users with the deepest pockets, rather than in the direction of features that most users want. Yes, this is how capitalism works, but I think outcomes would be better if more users paid less.