Diabolic, it’s not right what you say about GPL users.
We are not parasites but use a great product and also promote it.
GPL should always be free and unlimited domains.
I seen no mention here of licences being used on multiple servers.
The Webmin team can make money on support.
I would gladly pay a premium for support on each server I have. ( instances )
The webmin team seem to be busy with static math.
Diabolic, it’s not right what you say about GPL users.
We are not parasites but use a great product and also promote it.
I just presented the facts and its not important if you or anyone else like it or not. Really that doesnt change anything. If you feel i call you out that is your problem and probably there is a reason for that. To me its simple, if you are using GPL version to make money you are abusing the license, now if you want to call this a parasite or something else its up to you.
GPL should always be free and unlimited domains.
Why? Is there any rule for this. Do you feel entitled to have GPL in current state?
I seen no mention here of licences being used on multiple servers.
There is no control panel who offers one license on multiple servers. Always was and it will be one license = one server.
The Webmin team can make money on support.
That is correct and i hope they will introduce server management in the future.
I would gladly pay a premium for support on each server I have.
Thats great but you are paying only for their time needed to manage your server, for the time invested in coding for Vmin you must pay separately (Pro) if you want to use this control panel in business, e.g. making money.
The stigma what was built around Vmin is absolutely wrong and need to be changed. Until now i didnt see any valid reason to keep GPL unlimited. But anyone is welcome to come and change this just skip the part where you “think” how you should have anything free.
Diabolico,
Don’t forget GPL means open source, bypassing a 10 domains limit will be trivial, just a switch in the code.
Also, all these people that are not paying for vmin, they’ll go elsewhere. You’d be losing userbase which though not paying, I’m sure they’re not totally useless either.
It’s perfectly fine making money with GPL software, in fact it revolutionized the world. Imagine how the world would look like now if everybody had to pay licenses to use e.g. the Linux kernel.
I think the ideas I submitted previously might be actually possible to implement and raise some awareness that there is a Pro version and it actually brings some valuable features.
There is nothing wrong with folks using Virtualmin GPL for any purpose – no one is abusing anything.
We have given Virtualmin GPL away for free, in the hopes that people find it awesome. We will not be limiting it’s features.
Let’s keep this discussion relating to Virtualmin Pro, and how to make it awesome 
Let us know how you’d like to see Virtualmin Pro licensing work!
-Eric
Hey cyrus,
Thanks for your feedback. We’ve gotten enough people chiming in here and in other threads with a preference for annual options, that we will be providing both annual and monthly methods of purchase.
And, if we change prices in such a way that it increases renewal prices for existing Virtualmin license holders, we will provide some sort of discount or coupon to make it more fair for them on their next renewal. We never want to punish our existing users with price changes (which is why we’re slow to change, and why we consult with as many users as possible before making the change).
The change to unified purchase/renewal pricing has been on my mind for years, and I think it’s time to give it a try. It solves a number of problems caused by the current renewal pricing, and I believe it can work out fairly even for existing users as long as we send our current users a gift to make their next renewal the same price they were expecting.
The new shopping cart allows us to provide all sorts of nice features, and we want to make sure we provide the nicest experience possible. Too many options makes it confusing; and we’ve often had confusion over our licensing vs. renewal vs. upgrade prices. So, we’re gonna try to make those questions go away, both with a much better user interface with more clear pricing and terms, and a simpler pricing model. The fact that the pricing gets cheaper for people to first get into VIrtualmin Professional is a really nice side effect. Price is always a very big deciding factor for folks in whether they use GPL or buy Professional, so a lower barrier for that first purchase is nice.
Let’s keep this discussion relating to Virtualmin Pro, and how to make it awesome
GPL and Pro are too much interconnected between each other and just changing one will not make much difference. But if you want quick resolution then:
split Pro license to VPS and dedicated with different prices
be slightly cheaper than mainstream like Plesk and cPanel
remove domain limit
make it faster because compared to others Vmin is slow especially vs Plesk 12 where they did amazing job
remove obsolete and rarely used modules and make them install by request
This will be enough to give you fair chance to enter in the game. Anything extra you add to Pro version will be just a nice bonus.
Hey, I will fight Diabolico once more In my point of view you will become a crap company if you will limit somehow GPL - just don’t pour anymore all those nice features into it, this is as far as I would go. Keep it as it is today as the feature goes and that’s it (see below). Enough is enough, I agree. Still, do not destroy any GPL version, else what will be the reason for its existence? Do you need a demo - well, than offer a proper demo?
The reasons were explained countless times here: you will loose all the respect in the community - should I remind the nice article Linux Foundation wrote about you (posted on FB a while ago)? Or the plethora of blogs that are supporting your direction? And the sysadmins years of consideration and respect - if for Diabolico doesn’t matter, for me it would.
What is this non sense “not letting people making money out of it”? Is it GPL or not? If it is they should be making money, if they can of course. BTW Diabolico - I have Virtualmin Pro 100 and Cloudmin 10 if you are wondering why I am writing this, so I am already a customer. I am speaking out of principle here, for the sake of OpenSource, the growth of the community, and your products market penetration. Use that, don’t destroy that. This is as hell not the moment to “close” but to “open” even Microsoft is getting that, and you have a strategical advantage - don’t loose it.
Diabolico, once again - you have no right to shame people for using GPL software, call them leeches, parasites, abusers, bad, false and stuff? WTF, I am still thinking you really have no elementary idea what Open Source is. As I told you in a thread that even began to be moderated, and our posts deleted, take your snobbish attitude and shove it, elsewhere. And don’t start the answering to me routine, watch Stallman or such to clear your head boy. You mad for money or what?
I am also for another scheme than Diabolico - it’s exactly the opposite: do not split and make none-sense licensing between VPS hosting and dedicated. What is the difference, and the meaning of it for your customers, I really don’t get it… In fact you shouldn’t do it - just tell me the number of domains to know exactly what am I expecting/paying for. Why should you care in what kind of the machine I am using your product??? In fact I should have the liberty to move my domains as I see fit, where I see fit. You will loose me as your client if you take this away from me.
In fact my old request stands - give us the freedom to split the number of domains, between any number of machines, virtual or physical, as we see fit.
Because I am the kind of guy who loves his freedom, been a corporate sale guy for 10+ years, so maybe I know a thing or two about licenses. And I really hate the stupid ones. And I am choosing products strictly on this criteria.
As for the billing I couldn’t care less how you do it, you should of course decide in your best interest here. I would be fine with any scheme, but I prefer though to bulk buy the number of months I want (if monthly billing will be your direction) please don’t get me worrying each month/always be in the danger of expiring licenses/not getting updates or anything in this direction. I don’t need another thing to watch and worry for, and I hope there will be enough of us to hate this. So if you will bill monthly give me the option to buy 6, 12, 24 months let’s say.
The freedom to spread the domains across servers would be brilliant and more people would buy the Pro I would have thought, I would that’s for sure. I use the GPL version on my servers but I will start to offer the PRO if a client wishes at cost price added to the server. Not sure how a domain owner would profit other than more 1 click installs. I would have more bells and whistles though to play with.
Might be too late here but thought I’d throw in my 2 cents…
1. Monthly subscriptions.
I prefer an annual subscription but you won’t lose me as a customer over this.
2. A lower cost, lower end license.
Maybe the gpl could be unsupported, or community supported only.
3. Unified renewal pricing.
I’m not sure I agree with this one, the longer you have a customer the less support they should need with knowledge and experience using your product. Many software products are sold then maintained with 20-30% renewal pricing (which I’m not suggesting) but those scenarios typically involve big initial investments, but the logic still holds, right? Growing customer base with mix of new and renewal sales. I would suggest that part of the fix here could be a better support environment, specifically self-help support to help ease that burden.
I have personally spent hours searching for information in the past for a particular issue but half the “hits” are outdated legacy docs and the other half support/forum posts that either don’t have a resolution or if they do it’s not relevant to my needs. This forces me to open a ticket with you guys… When I do that you guys rock, I mean absolutely rock. Some of those instances are me being stupid, some are fixes or adjustments you guys need to make, but we usually can find a fix. The result of this is I’m being trained to just open a support ticket whenever we have an issue - that’s not good. We do everything we can in our organization to minimize tickets - support is expensive.
The second part of this is that I wish Virtuamin had a simpler interface. Create/disable/delete, add/edit/delete users for ftp/sftp/email, dns, databases, backup/restore. That covers 95% of what you need to for each domain. Take email for example, editing users/aliases is straight forward but then you have Server Configuration -> Email Settings; Services -> SpamAssassin Configuration; and Server Configuration -> Spam and Virus Delivery. Want to edit a user signature, that’s not located in user preferences that’s located under the Inbox. For me I find it un-intuitive to the tasks performed.
4. Only monthly subscriptions
Same response as 1 above, perfer annual but you won’t lose us as a customer over this.
Some other comments on information from other posts in this thread.
Forget about vps/ded pricing - hosting resources (vps or dedicated) are just that, resources to provide hosting services.
I don’t agree with limiting or hobbling gpl, I do agree with providing more separation between it and the pro version. I can name only 2 things different between gpl/pro - Reseller capability and install scripts.
Regarding my number 3 above, I think you could save yourselves a lot of time with some changes in these two areas. I want you to make money, we are vested in you as part of how to service customers and manage our environment. I don’t want you to disappear, that would be a nightmare…
The idea of licensing number of domains across multiple servers is interesting to me. We currently run a mix of cloudmin/gpl and pro. We have a gpl that does nothing but manage DNS (create the zone and push it to our DNS servers). I don’t need pro to do that but have no problem having it covered under a site license, etc. How would you handle mydomain.com on web server A, mail server B and database server C? Would that be one domain or 3? This is interesting to us though.
I do think some paid project work would be a good offering, I’m less excited about paid support - not because of the cost but rather the organization issues for you - that would be a huge shift in how and what you currently do. Support would need to be provided in minutes/hours under a paid plan.
This is exciting and I’m sure everyone here will support you the best we can through this change. I definitely want you guys to be a stronger company tomorrow! Thanks for all you to!
Hi Joe,
I think it is good to have alternative in subscription plans, some people maybe want to test things out month by month, and maybe then switch to a yearly plan. But adding a monthly plan should not change the yearly plans.
I don’t really see any big difference in $75/$75 yearly and $7 monthly, other than the monthly plan would give me more administrative work.
And I think the way subscription plans are now is really attractive, pay a few bucks more at the start and then have a lower yearly fee. This is also how most of the business people want it - in my opinion. If you use a printer much, you don’t buy a cheap printer with expensive small toner cartridges, you probably buy a more expensive printer with cheaper and bigger toner cartridges.
Removing your current plans would be totally wrong! But that doesn’t mean that you don’t should add the other options, $75/$75 yearly and $7 monthly. And if you would like to upgrade from these plans to $99/$45 you have to pay $99 the first year before dropping down to $45.
We have been a Virtualmin Pro customer for 10 years now and have been very happy with the current plans, and there would be a big difference in price for our 10 years looking at current plan and $75/$75.
If you need to charge more for subscriptions, that’s fine by me! Virtualmin have the best support ever and the software is worth every dollar!
Best regards,
Leffe (Blueforce)
It’s not too late, and these are great thoughts, and I appreciate them.
To answer some of your concerns and suggstions:
“1. Monthly subscriptions.”
We’ve had enough feedback in support of keeping annual options that they will be sticking around (they’ll even be slightly cheaper than monthly). So, you’ll be able to buy annually or monthly.
"2. A lower cost, lower end license.
Maybe the gpl could be unsupported, or community supported only."
GPL is already supposed to be predominantly community supported; but we end up picking up the slack a lot more than we’d like (and a lot more than we can really afford, if we want to have money and time left for UI, docs, new development, etc., which I think we’d all like to be true). That’s an issue to be addressed in a variety of ways: Simpler UI (we’re working on it), more docs (we’ve already got 1000+ pages worth of docs, but that’s a problem in and of itself…Virtualmin and Webmin are deep products with an incredible amount of complexity). We may need to have a serious “What features and options do we kill?” conversation with the community going forward, in order to simplify the products and reduce people’s confusion. Moving some things out into optional plugins would also be a path forward that could simplify the UI without dumbing down the product.
I think, at this point, we’re sticking with our current license sizes, and not adding any new ones. Initial pricing will drop, since we’ll be unifying prices for new purchases vs. renewals.
"3. Unified renewal pricing.
I’m not sure I agree with this one, the longer you have a customer the less support they should need with knowledge and experience using your product."
That’s why we’ve got the pricing we currently have. But, it has some big negative side effects that I believe have been too costly for us as a company (and as a community that needs to grow in order to thrive). Here’s the biggest problem with the current model: It makes getting setup with Virtualmin look more expensive than many other options on the market, even if long-term ownership is quite a bit lower. When people compare a $99 purchase price (or, in the past a $139 purchase price) to some of our lower priced competitors, it was hard to swallow if they weren’t already aware of the value of Virtualmin vs. those lower cost options. What’s worse is that very few of those folks ever looked to see that the renewal cost was only $45, making it cheaper longterm than almost anything else out there.
But, I know it’s going to be a hit for our existing customers, and we never want to punish the folks who’ve supported us over the past ten years. We’ll balance that out. I’m having a heck of a time implementing the method by which we do it, but for the folks who’ve been with use for years, you’ll get a bonus when the new pricing goes live, or soon after. We want you to be as happy about the new site and new store and new pricing as everybody else will be (at least, I’m pretty sure everyone will be happy). And, we also want to make more sales while keeping all of our existing customers coming back. I’m highly sensitive to changes that are going to hit those existing customers in their wallet.
In short: I think you’ll be OK with changes we’re settling on.
“Forget about vps/ded pricing - hosting resources (vps or dedicated) are just that, resources to provide hosting services.”
I agree with you on this front. It’s kind of old-fashioned to think of a VPS as vastly under-powered vs. a dedicated server. But, I think we’ve come up with a plan that’ll make the folks suggesting this happy, anyway, even though we’re never gonna see eye-to-eye on a VPS being somehow less of a server.
“I don’t agree with limiting or hobbling gpl, I do agree with providing more separation between it and the pro version. I can name only 2 things different between gpl/pro - Reseller capability and install scripts.”
The third really big one is system statistics tools (the graphs of CPU/memory/etc.), which can also be shared to Cloudmin. But, there are several dozen other small things.
Nonetheless, in the new shop, there will be a really clear value proposition. And the value provided by Professional will be larger and more clear. And, I think we’ve settled on the plan of going back to major new features always landing in Pro first, and trickling down to GPL over the next year or two. We won’t be limiting domains or otherwise hobbling GPL with arbitrary limits.
“The idea of licensing number of domains across multiple servers is interesting to me. We currently run a mix of cloudmin/gpl and pro. We have a gpl that does nothing but manage DNS (create the zone and push it to our DNS servers). I don’t need pro to do that but have no problem having it covered under a site license, etc. How would you handle mydomain.com on web server A, mail server B and database server C? Would that be one domain or 3? This is interesting to us though.”
We’re not going to do multi-server licensing, at least not in the simple form of dividing domains across servers…because our biggest paying customers would suddenly be worth almost nothing to our bottom line (an unlimited license would effectively mean no one would ever need more than one license, no matter how many thousands of servers they have). Realistically, split server licenses, even without the Unlimited license being qualified for it, would reduce our revenue by a bit more than half overnight, and would bankrupt us in a year. There’s just no way that licensing change would double the customer base.
All that said, for your scenario, we’ve been working on those kinds of features, and it’s one of the new things we’re launching with the new site; it’s been in private beta with a few people, and I’ve talked about it a bit with folks, but we’re launching it widely soon, with docs and a full product in the shop. You won’t need a Virtualmin license for the “extra” servers (like DNS, database, mail scanning, which are the first three services we support off-loading from your Virtualmin servers), so they would not consume domains on those other servers. You’d have your domain on one Virtualmin server (and an optional backup/hot spare/development server, which is already, and has always been, allowed) and then the DNS, database, and mail scanning, could all be happening on four other servers (two for DNS) without any need for worrying about domain counts on those systems.
“I do think some paid project work would be a good offering, I’m less excited about paid support - not because of the cost but rather the organization issues for you - that would be a huge shift in how and what you currently do.”
Very astute. We’ve built the company as a software company, not a support company. Which is why we’re so few people; we may be good at support (or, at least, Eric is very good at support, while me and Jamie somehow struggle through). Becoming a support company would, by necessity, alter our course quite a bit, and it’s not a thing I necessarily want to do. It’s always kind of a default answer when people discuss Open Source projects trying to make a living from it, but I’ve never considered it a good answer. It’s like saying, “I really like building cars.” And someone responding, “I know! You should become a taxi driver.”
The better answer may be to make things easier to use, rather than spending a bunch of time doing hands-on support to help people use it.
We’re thinking hard about this, and won’t be announcing any major new support offerings immediately, but may introduce some sort of support offering in the future. In the short term, the only support-related thing we’ll be adding is the ability to get premium support for our Open Source tools; this will be on a per-incident basis, so buying Professional will still be the best way to get support for Virtualmin for most folks, but for people who want to stick with Virtualmin or Cloudmin GPL, or who need help with Webmin or Usermin, we’ll have a way for them to give us money in exchange for help.
“This is exciting and I’m sure everyone here will support you the best we can through this change. I definitely want you guys to be a stronger company tomorrow!”
We do, too, and it’s certainly been weighing on me that our website and shopping experience has stagnated for such a long time; the Drupal upgrade has been a bit of a quagmire that I’ve been slogging through off and on for over a year now. Drupal has been a blessing and a curse…mostly a curse, when it comes to upgrading. But, the new site, new pricing, and some other new stuff coming, I believe, will be really nice for everyone. I’m pretty excited to be as close to launch as we are, and to have so many little surprises up our sleeve for the launch. And, me finally being free of the website migration will allow me to work on my huge todo list for Virtualmin and Cloudmin (also, Ilia and I have some big plans for the UI/UX).
Thanks again for your thoughts. I think we’re gonna launch the new site with changes that folks really like.
Thanks for chiming in, Leffe. I’m always happy to hear longtime supporters opinions.
We won’t forget about existing customers, and we’ll go out of our way not to punish folks who’ve been loyal by hitting them with big price increases. But, we do need to simplify our product offerings rather than increase them (this one is something I’ve known for a while, and it’s something that I’ve gotten flack for for years from product and marketing people that I’ve talked with about it).
As it stands now, I think I can say with confidence the following:
We’ll have both monthly and annual options.
There will no longer be a “renewal” price. Annual and monthly products will renew at the same price, but that price will be lower than the current purchase price (probably by quite a bit). So, your renewals will go up by a few bucks, but not a lot, and new licenses will be quite a bit cheaper than they currently are.
Our long-time users will get a credit, or coupon, or a free license extension (I dunno exactly how I’m implementing this yet) to balance that change out to make the hit smaller and to make up the difference in what you paid for the initial license vs. what new pricing will be.
More importantly, we’ll be focusing on ramping up the value that Virtualmin Pro and Cloudmin Pro users get out of the products, without making GPL worse (i.e. we’ll begin pushing new capabilities and new modules out for Pro, which will trickle down to GPL over time, as we did things for the first few years…back when we were making enough money to pay ourselves and go to trade shows and stuff!).
I’m not gonna reveal too much about specifics, but I think folks will like what we’re doing and where we’re going with the products, the projects, and the company.
I’ve been using virtualmin gpl for years, I have about 10 Linode servers using it. The reason we never purchased virtualmin is because of the domain limits, or expense of it for higher limits. To have pro on all our servers would cost us loads more. We use Linode and manage servers ourselves to save money. If we had Pro on all servers then we may as well not use Linode and virtualmin but go to a host that support managed cpanel servers and put more sites on fewer servers.
But I would like to pay for it. I would like to give something back and I would like more priority on support. Just not on a per server or domain limit basis. And it can’t cost a lot more each month. A support plan is a good idea opposed to a per server license. We won’t need 10 times support than having 1 server, there is no difference in the support we need having 1 server or 10, or 1 domain or 100.
Hi Joe,
I’ve been using both Webmin and Virtualmin since the beforetime. I have a few thoughts and ideas based upon my usage, which I don’t ascribe to any other use cases, so feel free to reject everything out of hand. That said, if you have the time to hear me out, it would be appreciated.
For the purposes of this discussion I am going to consider Webmin and Virtualmin as, if not one and the same, intrinsically linked. They are in practice for me.
WEBMIN:
First off, I use Webmin for every single Linux box I work with. It is my default management interface as I support systems in mixed environments with a lot of Windows admins. Virtualmin is deployed on the rare system that hosts multiple websites. I would love a way to pay a nominal fee per Linux VM to support the ongoing development of Webmin. $25 per year? Maybe $50?
What I would like to get for the Webmin fee is something similar to Spacewalk (http://spacewalk.redhat.com/). It doesn’t have to be much. It just has to be a “single pane of glass” that individual Linux servers can “register” with so that I have one “Linux server managment page” to go to which in turn has every single “registered” server. No discovering the IPs of 50 different boxes and logging in one at a time.
More critically, I would like to be able to handle - at a minimum - patching for all systems from this single interface. Sort of a WSUS for Linux. Ideally, I would have a single UI that would show me the basic service monitoring as well. In a perfect world, linking up Webmin servers to the central system would also shuttle a copy of their logs to a central syslog server.
VIRTUALMIN:
Virtualmin has several use cases for me, each of which I realistically need to have the ability to license differently.
A really basic Virtualmin instance deployed to support a few websites, usually for non-profits or personal use. Functionality limiting is (mostly) fine here, as long as the basics are met. But it needs to be GPL/free.
A full bore Virtualmin used for testing, or for training. Here is where I, for example, host my personal sites. I have more than 10, less than 50 at any given time. I can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars out of my own pocket per year or a thousand up front. Yet I need to be able to keep my skills up with the full bore package. Could there be a “full/proper Virtualmin for personal/training use” license? Maybe restricted to about 50 domains? $100/year is something I could probably swing past the wife.
I would like to offer the point that I am perfectly fine NOT HAVING SUPPORT for this option. The forums are fine. I just need the full meal deal in terms of functionality.
Features requested for Virtualmin:
The “WSUS for Linux” concept discussed above in the Webmin section is critical. Managing the rapidly multiplying Linux servers is becoming difficult.
SSL that doesn’t suck. Most of these companies do not have IP addresses for each site. It just isn’t going to happen, especially with IPv4 exhaustion. So I need the ability to manage SSL certificates through Virtualmin such that each site can have it’s own cert but all sites share one IP address. The mail server just needs to have a cert related to the hostname, it doesn’t need to be responding with a different cert for each domain under management. Just get Apache working.
Similarly, Let’s Encrypt support is critical. I think it ties into the above portion of SSL management. The public beta starts tomorrow and to be perfectly frank new domains configured in virtualmin should by default have SSL certs from Let’s Encrypt and be set up for auto renewal.
How about $25 a year for Webmin-only nodes attached to the centralized management system, $50 per year for Virtualmin-attached nodes and then a per-domain charge? This lets us distribute and alter the systems and domains under management as we see fit, but you still get the funds you need to keep the lights on.
A) Spawn a load balancer which would claim ports 25, 80, 443 and so forth
B) Spawn Apache, MySQL, Postfix, Busybox, etc. containers for each domain configured
C) Configure the load balancer to pass back requests received to the relevant container
This would provide perfect isolation for domains from one another while still sharing a single IP address, management structure, etc. This is probably worth being a separate product, licensed separately, etc. It’s worth good money, but IMHO is worth more if it integrated with Webmin/Virtualmin and is part of the familiar environment we’ve worked with for years than if it were some completely separate UI for a completely separate product. We’re here because we like Virtualmin and want to keep using it.
As always, the above are my personal use cases, desires and dreams. They are not demands, but sincere requests.
Above all, thank you for all the effort put into the *mins over the years. Your efforts make Linux better.
Hi Joe,
For licenses monthly and yearly licenses is the way most business work with. Yearly licenses usually have a 1 or 2 months discounts. This leaves room to increase a little monthly price in a way that yearly prices may reflect current unified price.
In the case of lower ending cost that is not profitable, you may try the following:
IMPROVE THE DOCUMENTATION (KNOWLEDGE BASE) - this is one of the worst documentation maybe it is the search engine but I can not find solutions that I need and that are there. In contrast support it is great!
KEEP DOCUMENTATION UPDATED - As new ticket are solved, add the solutions to the Documentation or the Knowledge base.
OPEN DOCUMENTATION / KNOWLEDGE BASE to all versions paid and not paid, so less support request are generated
PROVIDE SUPPORT TO PAID VERSIONS - this is less desirable but it might be based on time to answer as in SLA or engineer lever to answer, low priced versions may get a engineer Jr.
Thanks for the great support and the great products!