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Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

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Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#41

Post by Kovah »

triyambakam wrote: post #31

There is a dead comment that not so nicely stated that large companies are the biggest funders to open source. This doesn't seem too far off... anyone have any data?

I think it's really hard to gather data for this, because aside from a few big projects, most sponsoring and stuff is happening outside of any traceable area, i.e. private people sponsoring other private people for some small software.

I think the point is: the contributions of some companies to few, very large projects are about the same as the thousands of 1-dollar-contributions private people do to the remaining 99.9% of open source software.

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#42

Post by TAForObvReasons »

MattGaiser wrote: post #30
_lbaq wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do not need to do that, they just get a report from the banks and ask you to declare your income.

I suspect you are European.

For US citizens, you have to provide social security number. Stripe may have some minimum requirement to generate a 1099 and report to the IRS, but that number is definitely less than $600 ($50/mo)

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#47

Post by TAForObvReasons »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #40
MattGaiser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you are European.

In the USA, any non-shady organization will send you a 1099- report of how much income you generated. You're supposed to submit that form when you do your taxes, which is kind of dumb, because a copy of the 1099 was already sent to the IRS. USA tax filing is not efficient for reasons... gives Intuit the stink eye

The threshold for a 1099-MISC is $600. Plenty of non-shady organizations won't file extra paperwork.

Another 1099 example: For most states Stripe won't issue you a 1099-K if you don't meet both $20K volume and >200 charges. Is Stripe shady?

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#48

Post by superasn »

Depends on how popular your project is.

1. Evan you (creator of vuejs) makes kind of a salary via patreon [1].

2. Taylor otwell (creator of laravel) has created many useful projects like spark and forge that generate amazing revenue.

3. Creator of sidekiq (mike) has created a million dollar business by creating premium upsells [2]

4. And finally of course there are free and hosted versions of the software like WordPress that are in a league of their own (also recently noticed a site called Browserless which has done quite well with this model)

[1] https://blog.patreon.com/vue-js-creator-evan-you

[2] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side...

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#49

Post by gsempe »

It’s really complicated for an open source maintainers to be able to focus 100% of the time on the open source project. Patreon, Github sponsor or Open Collective exist on the sponsoring side. If your community gathers persons who do the same work you can as well create a job board. I’m doing https://roleup.com and it’s the perfect tool in this case. Ask me anything. I’ll reply with pleasure.

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#50

Post by gitgud »

behindsight wrote: post #27
gitgud wrote: post #16

Working enough making money purely from Open-source is difficult to achieve and usually requires; amazing projects, a good reputation, a big network of followers. But there's also some good monetisation strategies: - Consulting, at the bottom of your project "Hire the creator" - Donations, at the bottom of your project "Donate here" - Open-core, have an open-source core and a premium version with more features (these…

> Open-core, have an open-source core and a premium version with more features (these suck) Out of genuine curiosity, are there some egregious examples that merits (these suck) , or is it more of a blanket statement? I would love to avoid making those mistakes.

"Open-core sucks" is a blanket statement as the incentives of the business do not align with the users of the project. And as a result, in my book it's a red flag for an open-source project, and I can't think of a single project I like which does this.

The incentive of an "Open-core" business is to convert people to the premium version of the product.

This has the effect of hindering/restricting development on the community/free-version, as it's vital that the community version needs to be worse than the premium version.

Almost any monetisation strategy has this effect on open-source though. Say for example consulting; if you're paid to help users setup/configure your project, then your incentive is to have people struggle with your project so they need to pay you for help...

As you can tell I'm a little pessimistic, but in my opinion almost any project that is open-source and trying to make money off it's users, has incentives that will negatively impact the project and it's users...

Hope this helps, I'm still open to projects which have any of these monetisation strategies, but they have to be of much, much higher quality for me to seriously consider.

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