I think you can make money on Open Source, but I think you need partners to do so. I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven open source community called OS2. We’re around 60 members, and we’ve recently won a national award for tech-reuse issued by our ministry of digitisation and around 10 interest groups.
We don’t build the code ourselves. We do own, review and manage the code. We handle the project management and we facilitate access to our business processes and employees, but the actual development is something we buy.
Once things get build we often end up buying the various projects as SAAS solutions because we aren’t really geared to operate OS techs. We do have excellent federated authentication, network security and API services, but we genuinely don’t want to operate a horde of different tech stacks. This makes us a perfect match for anyone who knows how to do SAAS in the cloud though, and most of the things we build end up being run in Azure or AWS by a supplier.
So far it’s been a really beneficial relationship. We get ownership, better quality and faster more agile development. Our local development houses still make money, both from development but also from SAAS.
It has been especially good for our smaller dev houses, because a system isn’t locked down to a single supplier for years.
This last bit is entirely my personal opinion, but I prefer buying software from a local shop and helping them build and expand their businesses. On the plus side of this, they co-operate a lot better too. Municipalities are trying partners who can’t make up our minds, and a small agile shop who doesn’t point to the 4 year old contract every time you want a tiny change, has just been so refreshing.