Making Money from Open-Source Software
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Making Money from Open-Source Software
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Re: Making Money from Open-Source Software
#2getting paid for integration?
1) create a popular open source product
2) give it away, building market share and awareness
3) shake down corporations making money from your open source product in the form of "licensing & maintenance agreement*
4) Trickle down effect on non corporate users who in turn feed back into the loop by performing QA and community support.
I personally believe this is the future of software, at least someone who is competing against VC funded proprietary entities looking to IPO and not really give a shit about the product that brought them in a position to raise money.
What do you guys think? This is just my opinion of course downsides to this model.
One major downside of openin the doors to everybody is you get a ton of noises. People who shouldn't be using it complaining and it's always tricky to manage, especially when people feel entitled to it as it is free.
An argument to this noise is that any noise is better than no noise, meaning any type of engagement good or bad is considered a plus for the app, to discover new shit
Re: Making Money from Open-Source Software
#3I guess it depends on the category, for something like a database it can be easy to charge money (e.g. managed instances, charging cloud vendors, etc...) but something like frontend javascript framework it's almost impossible to do that
Re: Making Money from Open-Source Software
#4I guess it depends on the category, for something like a database it can be easy to charge money (e.g. managed instances, charging cloud vendors, etc...) but something like frontend javascript framework it's almost impossible to do that
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Re: Making Money from Open-Source Software
#5I work for a Danish municipality that co-operates a number of open source projects with other muniplacities. I know we’re a niche of sorts, but the setup we apply is to find small local development houses who can build and maintain our code based, but also sell us hosting.
We’ll need a system to handle our vacationflow, with employees reporting it, managers approving it and an integration to our payment system. We’ll handle the business understanding (it involves around 33 different tax laws and some silly organisational culture), the project management and the whole governance around the code base. You do the coding, and then you sell us the hosted solution which you run in Azure or AWS letting our ADFS handle authentication.
It’s worked marvellous so far.
Re: Making Money from Open-Source Software
#6Not a question about the article but related: what software tools are lacking in the community? Where should people start looking when brainstorming for project ideas?
We can all agree we need to give back to the community. Eventually we will need to eat too.
Re: Making Money from Open-Source Software
#7After reading this several times I still don't understand "how [they] did it." Also tried the AGPL description.[1] Can someone confirm: They just licensed it so that commercial use is prohibited without payment?
I've worked (and am working) with companies that have an open-source product and a commercial offering built around it. My experience is that it's easy to get _some_ companies to pay you, whether it's for the right license, added features, support, or consultation. But to make any significant revenue you're going to have to work hard to provide a lot more value on top of the open-source option, and you probably don't want it to be "consulting."
Then you realize that all your prospective buyers are anchored at "free" and need a lot of convincing (perceived value) to pay for the commercial version. The positioning needs careful consideration. Nobody wants to pay a five- or six-figure license for a slighty-better-than-the-free-version solution.
[1] https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-lice...
Re: Making Money from Open-Source Software
#8After reading this several times I still don't understand "how [they] did it." Also tried the AGPL description.[1] Can someone confirm: They just licensed it so that commercial use is prohibited without payment? I've worked (and am working) with companies that have an open-source product and a commercial offering built around it. My experience is that it's easy to get _some_ companies to pay you, whether it's for the…
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Re: Making Money from Open-Source Software
#9For others looking for ways to monetize open source, we’ve learned at Ionic that many enterprises aren’t just looking to buy a premium version of your OSS project, they want your help solving (with software) a ton of related challenges around the technology/space, too.
The big money is in doing those things too and not just being one small piece of the puzzle. So, for us, that means helping teams be successful with app development in general using our software/tech in the process (i.e. scalable software product on a yearly subscription and the same as sold to other customers, not custom development).
If you want to go down that route, get ready to have excellent support and be willing to be seen as an expert that your customers are going to call upon. But support is tablestakes for B2B so that comes with the territory.
Of course, this is no small leap. Going from having a successful open source project to building an enterprise business around it is really hard and took a lot longer than I expected. Looking back I wish we spent a little less time worrying about GitHub stars and more about solving enterprise problems, but we made it through!
Of course this is just one way to monetize and I’m also excited about the growing OSS sustainability offerings out there, like Tidelift
Re: Making Money from Open-Source Software
#10I personally like CrossOver's model. It doesn't include anything you couldn't already do with Wine, but it's less setup, and you have a support staff that can look at it if you really need a particular program to work under Wine. Any improvements they make are upstreamed to Wine.
I have no idea if they're "profitable" or not.