lol. That, too. There are some days I’m burned out from looking at computers for my job that pays, and don’t have the energy to look at computers for the job that mostly doesn’t pay (Virtualmin).
That must be true for many of us.
I theoretically retired over a decade ago ha!
You are right. I am goign to pay licenses for many instances that I use… Sorry, since it is not mandatory and/or agressive I honestly forget to pay.
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We’re not comfortable being too aggressive about it. The reality is we want people to use our software regardless of ability to pay, because we think the world is better when everybody can build their own websites and web applications and host their own email outside of the handful of corporate walled gardens. It’s a small thing, but it’s a thing we can do and a thing we’re pretty good at. Virtualmin GPL is Free Software (free as in beer and free as in freedom) and always will be, and we never discourage anyone from using it.
But, it’s also a balancing act. We all have other jobs, by necessity, and also need to live lives outside of working on computers. So, the revenue from our commercial products frees up time and energy that might otherwise go to daily survival. Ideally, revenue would allow us to not have other jobs, but we’re pretty far from that. Realistically, the company makes enough for about one engineer’s salary (an engineer outside of Silicon Valley, anyway…it wouldn’t even pay one salary in the valley), and there are four of us. So, Virtualmin currently exists because of a lot of volunteer labor over the past 20 years, mostly from the same handful of people (Jamie and Ilia carry the lion’s share these days).
We also welcome other volunteer labor, as most Open Source projects do. If there’s something that you wish Virtualmin had or could do, you have the source and can make it happen. The installer, the configuration system, and all of the modules (except WordPress Workbench) are open source in our github, mostly GPL-licensed, some BSD. It’s mostly Perl and JavaScript, but it’s possible to do most of the work in any language and just hook up to the Webmin API and serve the frontend in Perl (frontend can be JavaScript, but you have to have a CGI script Webmin’s app server can run for ACLs and such). If you hope to have something merged into Virtualmin core in the future, the backend needs to be 100% Perl, (but a lot of features are better as modules/plugins, anyway).
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