Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

I think Open Source really works for infrastructure projects and it's possible to do really well either working on a system like Kubernetes or Elasticsearch.

Not so well for projects that are more focused on consumers.

My app, Polar, is focused more on consumers and is an app for people to managed their reading and notes. Similar to Evernote but also has spaced repetition support like Anki and we're working on collaboration features too:

https://getpolarized.io/

I wanted Polar to be Open Source but we've had almost zero source code contributions in the last six months.

Most of our contributions from users have been from people suggesting features, filing bugs, suggesting architecture changes or product/market fit issues.

These have been very helpful of course.

However, to date, we've only raised about $500.

To be clear I'm working on Polar full time so I've probably made about $0.15 per hour...

I think there's a lot of reasons for this actually but if I were to narrow it down.

1. Consumers hate paying for software. The plan with Polar is to go with a freemium model so we need 100k or so users.

2. There's a big of a 'tragedy of the commons' here with the donations aren't coming in because everyone assumes someone else will donate.

This is really a bad situation in a lot of ways for the 'self hosting' crowd. They want quality apps but they're not willing to pay for them.

We're polling our users about why they haven't donated and here are the current results:

https://i.imgur.com/cOUy10f.png

I think my next main goal is to do some sort of Kickstarter and try to raise $150k or so.

Either that or focus on raising grants or VC.

- support

- training

- ease of install

- ease of upgrade

- indemnity (e.g., Red Hat promises to pay your court costs if someone sues for patent infringement)

- stability (long term support releases)

Those are all things that plain old open source by itself doesn't provide, but Red Hat does.

Red Hat built a very successful business, AFAIK, selling support to enterprise customers.

> Would things be different for the companies we've been talking about lately (mongo, redis, elastisearch, etc.) if they had gone with a GPL license and a Red Hat-like business model from the start?

Probably not; there's lots of companies selling enterprise support around permissively-licensed software.

It seems most of the ones at issue want to sell SaaS platform services, and would face the same problem with well established SaaS platforms beating them at that game with their own open source software if it was copyleft licensed as if it was permissively-licensed.

OTOH if they close it off and make it exclusive it's going to be hard to keep a sufficient premium in software quality to make their platforms attractive over broader platforms with weaker lock-in, even if those other platforms require a more broadly-supportable second-choice alternative software package in place of the proprietary vendors secret sauce component.