Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money

It looks like DevFlight's focus is on identifying active revenue streams for maintainers, based on whatever aspects the maintainer is flexible in commercializing (priority support, feature requests, etc). That's an awesome way to help create revenue without splitting the maintainers' attention between sales and the project.

A tangentially related idea I've had for helping fund OSS is offering a service that generates a passive revenue stream for projects via merchandise/swag sales. Essentially, the project gives you a license to use their IP (logos, slogans, trademarks, etc) for use on merchandise, then you operate an online store that provides branded merchandise for the project and provide a royalty back to the project based on a percentage of profit.

It can be as passive as the maintainers want, other than (potentially) creating a CNAME to the online store and adding a link to their website. All of the operational aspects of running an online store are completely abstracted from the maintainer, and they just get a periodic royalty payment. Or as active as they want, if the maintainers want to take part in designing (or approving) the merchandise, promoting it, etc.

The passive version also works perfectly for 501(c)3 non-profits, as the royalty payments would qualify as an exception to the "unrelated business income" rules and be considered tax-exempt revenue[1].

The size of the revenue stream is pretty proportional to the popularity of your project, so hidden projects with lots of indirect users would likely only generate a modest amount of revenue. But projects with a lot of direct users/site traffic or an engaged/passionate community would likely be a hit, from individuals buying stuff directly to manager's buying swag for their team.

If there are any project maintainers that would be interested in exploring the idea, please reach out (email in profile)! I can cover the execution side of things, and would love the chance to validate the model.

[1] Based on a naive reading of https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p598.pdf

I also like that DevFlight works with individual maintainers, rather than with projects. Many prolific maintainers work with several projects. They may not have created any of those projects, and they may not run them either. When the spotlight is on the project (and by extension the founders of "top dogs" of that project), those valuable maintainers get ignored. I'm glad DevFlight is focusing on the individual.

I had not, but it seems to back up my point.

From the Overview section: "F/OS software is developed by online communities of globally distributed contributors, the majority of whom are volunteers who rarely meet face to face."

And it uses KDE and GNOME as case studies, which are both very large, entrenched projects that are subsidized by companies like Red Hat and Canonical.

What I'm getting at, though, is that if you pick 1000 arbitrary repos on GitHub (or BitBucket or GitLab), 999 of them are not going to have any paid contributors. Once you start filtering by user and/or contributor counts you're removing a large amount of projects that aren't popular, but never the less count as open source projects.

Very fascinating, I will definitely listen to this. Thanks for sharing!