Making money with Open-Source

[kolaente]

You touched on the sustainability and companies paying for open-source software in your pilot, I'd love to expand that. As the maintainer of an open-source product, I'm very interested in ways of making the project my day job. This could give an overview over the different ways maintainers can make money and earn their living from their open-source projects.

I've observed a few ways people / companies seem to do this and would love to get your view on that:

• Donations (including the way @bagder / curl does it)
• Open-Core: Most of the code base is open-source under an osi-approved license, and additional features are licensed differently and need payment. GitLab does this.
• Support model: All the product is OSS, and their companies provide support contracts. Companies like Zammad and Nextcloud seem to be successful doing this.
• Hosting: Take the thing you built and make it available as SaaS. I think every company in the space building a product does that.
• VC: There's now a wave of companies doing what they call "Commercial Open-Source". Most of the time they are backed by venture capital of some kind. In general that's a mixture of Open-Core, the support model and SaaS. One prominent company here is ¢al.com (cal.com is also very interesting because they are an "open startup" which means they publish every internal thing from their company).
• "You can view the code but don't do anything else with it": The project makes its source code available but does not allow people to do anything with it (other than using the product, self-hosting). Is that even open-source? One company doing this is n8n
• There are probably other ways I forgot.

Lingering with all of the above is ofc the difference between actually building a product people can use and a library. Libraries are far more difficult to make money of, because the value proposition is different and products are easier to monetize.

[bagder]

Dual-license GPL vs proprietary is a popular way for libraries

[oej]

When I did almost full time Open Source coding in Asterisk it was easy to get funding for new sexy features, but not for more long time code maintenance. This really affects the product. I used trainings to get funding for that for a long time, but that market is dead.