I've started communicating a clear expectation (https://prosemirror.net/#about) that profitable users help support my software. Of course, most still won't, but some do, and with a big enough user base those contributions, plus some consulting around the projects, provides a decent income.
Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
81–90 of 318 posts
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#82I'm working on an open-source web analytics tool over at https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible . It's currently bringing in $800/mo and growing pretty fast. The code is all MIT license and we're working to make it easier to self-host. I make money through providing a hosted version of the product. It's a similar model to Sentry or Gitlab. Open-source does not have to be libraries and frameworks, there are g…
The solution looks great!
One advice: Make it easy to self host. I can see that this is not the case, perhaps not your focus currently. That will give you hundreds of free testers, that will provide QA to the solution you're making money creating. It's a beneficial cycle.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#83Sustainability is another way to say subsistence. The dirty secret of open source is that much of it is powered by maintainer guilt. If you’re looking to make money, I don’t recommend you get into open source. I wish this weren’t the case, but this is the current situation. Unfortunately, it seems the best path if you want to do open source as a career is to do enough open source to get your name out there and then l…
> Don’t be afraid to ask for money
This is where I fall over - damn my parents for teaching me to feel guilty about asking for money!
> One great hack for finding out who is using your package is to open an issue called "Who is using this?" and ask for testimonials or offer to put users' logos or links in the README under a "Who uses this" section
This is a fantastic idea - I'm going to try it! If companies don't know I'm open to the possibility of advertising their logo on my website (in an innovative way, using my library) then how can they consider giving me money for it?
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#84I've been working on SoundFingerprinting [1] for almost ten years now. Its Shazam for developers. First 8 years I worked mostly during my free time and weekends. 2 years ago, I decided to monetize the storage for the fingerprints. There is a MIT licensed version of the storage [2], and a commercial one [3], which is fine-tuned for thousands of hours of audio or video content. If you are an enterprise customer, you will essentially need it at some point, and will most probably have no problems paying for it.
Overall I invested a lot more time in it than the monetary reward I received. I don't complain since I enjoy working on audio/video fingerprinting and databases. On top of it, the pay at this stage is on par with a regular SE job with the bonus of working on things that I enjoy. I can call it a bootstrapped business now.
In some sense, I think about opensource similar to the work of art. You do it because you genuinely like to create/build things and showcase them to the general public. You don't do it because of the monetary reward. A good writer is one that has to say something, not one who writes for the sole purpose of getting on the NT bestselling list. Opensource is similar.
[1] - https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting
[2] - RAM-based storage, bounded by memory limits
[3] - https://emysound.com
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#85I give away my database publishing software ( https://www.speedata.de/ ) for free and make a living with offering services (helping companies producing high quality product catalogs and datasheets etc. using the software) Its not much, but I live a happy live. I spend about 1/2 of the time doing services and 1/2 hacking on the software. Quite often, customers are paying for new features in the software so it is paid…
Sounds wonderful! Fair, visibly useful and independent work.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#86> What are some tips to get into open source and turn it into fulltime career
I feel like you could replace "open source" with "programming" and it would be basically the same question.
There are two sides to working a successful business:
1) Having something of value people want
2) Figuring out how to 'capture' that value in a sustainable way
The vast majority of people either aren't very good at, or don't really enjoy, #2, and so they outsource the "how to make money off this" to a company (i.e., they work for a company). You write the software the company asks you to, and the company figures out how to make money from it.
The same thing goes for open source: Probably the dead easiest way to make money from open source is to apply for a job at RedHat. Or SUSE, or Ubuntu. Or one of the teams at Twitter or Facebook or Google that do open source. You get to work on open-source software, and the company gets to figure out how to capture value from the activity.
Alternately, you could work for yourself, but then you have to figure out how to capture that value yourself. There are lots of creative ways to do that, but you have to figure out your own market. And in the end, if you're successful, you'll probably have more demand than you can satisfy all by yourself, so you'll need to hire other people, in which case other developers will be outsourcing the "figure out how to capture value" thing to you.
Or, it can just be your hobby, and you can treat it as such: do it insofar as it's fun for you, and don't worry about anything else.
Me myself, I'm a developer paid full-time to work on open source software.
I also have a handful of hobby projects I've worked on in my spare time, which I've put up on github with an open license. Those are things I would be doing for my own purpose anyway; might as well let someone else use them if they want. But I'm never expecting them to become a big thing, and if they did I certainly wouldn't spend much time working on them unless I decided to try to take a jump and figure out how to make it pay.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#87I've been working full-time on different FLOSS projects.
Most of the time the only viable option is to work for an organization (either as an employee or not).
Don't go for FAANGs. There are other orgs and companies out there.
Asking random users for donations works on very few cases.
It's a sad state of things. Most modern technologies have been researched with public funding (semiconductors, fiber optics, GSM, GPS, touchscreens) but now people don't even remember that.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#88Depends 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 WordPr…
5. Dan Abramov (https://twitter.com/dan_abramov) is sponsored by FB to work on React. The case is similar to Victor Stinner (https://github.com/vstinner). He is paid by RedHat to work on Python.
6. Kyle Matthews works on Gatsby by VC's money. The business model is premium cloud service for incremental build.
Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#89I've been working on VideoLAN (VLC, x264, other...) for most of my professional life. For a long time, I had other jobs, working at startups around video, and doing VLC at nights and weekends and holidays. And now, I built a couple of companies around Open Source multimedia, where we do consulting, integration, custom development around software, applications development, licensing, support and so on. Those companies…
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Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself
#90I've been working on VideoLAN (VLC, x264, other...) for most of my professional life. For a long time, I had other jobs, working at startups around video, and doing VLC at nights and weekends and holidays. And now, I built a couple of companies around Open Source multimedia, where we do consulting, integration, custom development around software, applications development, licensing, support and so on. Those companies…
> And the rewards are not big.
At least in France you and VideoLAN are generally one of the first replies when someone ask about libre software and opensource in general. But yeah exposure don't pay the bills, unfortunately.