bschlagel
commented
5 years ago Love this! I think the section could maybe just be "Education", covering books & courses. Also, can't be certain, but my guess is in most cases the "merch" sorts of things e.g. the socks, or Discourse's offerings (https://cottonbureau.com/people/discourse) probably tend to be more a marketing thing than actual $ generator.
Some other big ones that come to mind for educational content:
- Wes Bos' JS courses: https://wesbos.com
- Laracasts, a whole online course platform from the Laravel community: https://laracasts.com/
- Zed Shaw's Learn Code the Hard Way: https://learncodethehardway.org/
- Michael Hartl's Learn Enough series: https://www.learnenough.com
- Julia Evans' awesome programming zines: https://wizardzines.com
Not sure if they're all open source contributors, and there's a huge range from side project to entire online instructional biz, but many good examples of devs making $ with educational material.
The Laravel/Laracasts example is one of the most spot on I've seen for education directly tied to the open source project/creators. I see they're also listed in the SaaS section…and probably a good example of "open core" as well with some of their add on projects like Spark (https://spark.laravel.com) and Nova (https://nova.laravel.com).
In the past few years, I've been noticing a lot of developers who create and make money from educational content (blog posts, videos, livestreams, etc). Feels like an important revenue stream to acknowledge in here.
When I first wrote this guide, I lumped all that into "Books and merchandise", but this category feels a little dated. So much more is happening on that front now! Might rename to "Content creation" or something like that, add some non-book examples, etc.
Will get to it uhhhh one day maybe, leaving this issue open as a reminder. Also, if anyone has great examples of developers creating content (Kent Dodds and Egghead.io are my canonical examples 😇), comment here and I'll add them in!