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Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

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Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#21

Post by devnonymous »

Open Source Projects is a broad term. It could include a pet project with to large scale projects like the Linux kernel with a few thousand developers.

Here are some of the reasons monetizing is either not feasible or not desirable:

* for small projects, most contribution is done in free time by one or a handful of maintainers for a most part and some random flyby contributions every once in a while. In such cases monetizing would imply more work that distracts from the primary work of building software and the maintainers do not want to spend their free time doing that.

* even for slightly larger projects that possibly commercial companies depend upon, monetizing would imply a change in prioritisation in what gets done. The maintainers would be obligated to invest their free time in doing what paying customers need rather than what the community or the maintainers themselves want.

* for even larger projects unless the interest reaches the threshold where the maintainer(s) can quit their day job and depend on the money coming in from the monetizing it just eats into their free time for not enough money

There are other reasons as well about how to come with a scheme where those contributing do not feel like they are submitting patches just so that the maintainer(s) get to make money for their work, or just the principle of the thing about paying it forward to the community they got so much free (as in beer) knowledge and experience from.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#24

Post by lumberjack »

I think it's better to see open source software as "cost reducing" rather than "revenue generating". Consider for example HHMV, developed by Facebook. The way to monetize your open source project is to get adopted/hired by the biggest commercial entity who makes use of your project.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#25

Post by kazinator »

> but it seems like there are very few projects that even attempt to monetize via dual-licensing, service contracts, etc.

You don't know everything about the activities of open-source developers with regard to their project. They may be involved in service contracts and dual licensing, without that being advertised on their project site.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#26

Post by mrleinad »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #19

I've tried it. I've failed at it. Halite is a libsodium wrapper for PHP projects that emphasizes ease-of-use and difficulty to misuse: https://github.com/paragonie/halite CMS Airship is a secure-by-default content management system (think WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.): https://github.com/paragonie/airship Both projects are released under GPL but offer commercial licenses. In two years, I've only had one person eve…

Do you have any stats on how many people use the first two products?

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#27

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

mrleinad wrote: post #26
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #19

I've tried it. I've failed at it. Halite is a libsodium wrapper for PHP projects that emphasizes ease-of-use and difficulty to misuse: https://github.com/paragonie/halite CMS Airship is a secure-by-default content management system (think WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.): https://github.com/paragonie/airship Both projects are released under GPL but offer commercial licenses. In two years, I've only had one person eve…

Do you have any stats on how many people use the first two products?

Roughly 15,000 for Halite https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie/halite

Less than 10 for Airship. There's a lot of reasons for that, though (aside from the fact that we built it to be Tor-friendly, so it's nontrivial to measure how many installs exist in the world): We only supported PostgreSQL and only users capable of installing libsodium from PECL could use it. PHP 7.2 will make it possible for everyone to use Airship version 2, and MySQL 8 will add CTEs so we might be able to support the more mainstream database. https://wiki.php.net/rfc/libsodium

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

#28

Post by bad_user »

People don't pay unless forced to do it. In other works, people only pay when there's scarcity.

What drives our economy? Scarcity. What's the long term effect of capitalism? Commoditization, i.e. driving the costs down. Some people view open source as being about a post-scarcity economy in which human labor isn't need, an economy based on abundance. That's bullshit though. Open source is about commoditizing software developers in order to increase profits.

So the answer to your question is that there are only 2 ways to commoditize open-source:

1. make it a complementary to something proprietary and sell that instead; the "open core" model is known to work well for some companies

2. choose a restrictive license to make it useless for the target audience (e.g. GPL / AGPL for libraries)

You'll notice that I'm not mentioning selling support. Some consultants earned their name by contributing to open-source. But you can also write books, or blogs and you'd probably earn a bigger following. And you're still selling your own personal time, which is limited, as there are only 24 hours in a day, you're probably not a rockstar to have obscene hourly rates and if you're thinking of building a company around supporting open source, just don't, as you're not Red Hat and you'll never be.

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