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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

#141

Post by svjatoslav »

I asked Richard Stallman this question: His answer was: Live cheaply.

Eric S. Raymond answer was: Be independently wealthy.

I have tried to reach billionaire philanthropists (Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Dean Kamen, Warren Buffet, and others) with the idea that there are very talented people around who have brilliant ideas (say for instance another Newton or Mozart) but are not financially independent to afford to work on those. Among good places to look for such talent is to identify and support important or promising open source projects and people behind them. But none of them bothered to respond.

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

#142

Post by madoublet »

I recently shutdown my open source project (respondcms.com). I spent over 5 years building it and was able to scrape some revenue out of support contracts, installations, and theme sales (~$100-300 /month). But, I never got to the point where it was sustainable. I do think that it helped me a lot in my 9-5 job as I was constantly solving problems and developing new skills. It also gave me a unique skillset that I used to development a new product called Profit Pages (https://profitpages.io/). In terms of tips to turn it into a full-time career, I would recommend (1) open source libraries, not complete products, (2) keep it small and sell the parts that make it complicated, (3) do not sell customizations (anything that does not scale past 1 person), (4) have a revenue plan from day one.

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

#143

Post by cddotdotslash »

I am the author of an open source cloud security tool (https://github.com/cloudsploit/scans). We also sold a hosted version, which wound up becoming fairly popular and bringing in decent money. Last year, the team and product were acquired.

There are numerous benefits to being open source. We built a community around the product, it played into marketing efforts, really helped attract developers at companies for bottom-up sales, and led to lots of improvements, many of them contributed by our paying users.

My point is that open source and "making money" don't need to be mutually exclusive. In fact, sometimes the open source side can really bolster the commercial side. This seems most effective at companies that offer a hosted version of their open source product. Very few large enterprises want to run things themselves if they can just pay a company to run it for them or provide support.

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

#144

Post by jbk »

dueF7un3 wrote: post #106
jbk wrote: post #57

I'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…

I wonder : do you have the same engineer turn over than "regular" companies, that is developers leaving after two or three years max? Everywhere around me, I see companies who expected to go big and profit on IPO failing. Nothing new, but I get the feeling it's getting harder to attract investors in that model (this was already a feeling I had before lockdown). This kind of company you're building, who focus on profi…

> I wonder : do you have the same engineer turn over than "regular" companies, that is developers leaving after two or three years max?

We don't. Clearly not. People leaving is very rare.

But also, our recruitment is very different from normal companies. :)

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

#145

Post by generalpass »

rbultje wrote: post #136
zozbot234 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those companies are now paying around 25 FTE. It's not too bad, but not impressive either That's actually really impressive, that software of such outstanding quality can be built and maintained so efficiently. It means that great things could be achieved if people bothered to fund FLOSS more, or if effective funding models (a combination of paying for ongoing support + crowdfunding for general development, most li…

This response reminds me of: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1258531455220609025 Opensource/free software powers most of the stuff we take for granted. The software and their maintainers are equally taken-for-granted.

I agree that the vast majority of people take a lot of open source for granted.

However, a lot of open source projects are, frankly, extremely rude to users. Instead of some copy-paste "kindly please direct your question to this resource over here" the users get "GET THE @#%% OUT OF HERE STUPID N00b" and this is from people directly with the project (e.g., domain email address).

If you think this doesn't impact your donations and recognition, please rethink that a little bit further.

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

#146

Post by jbk »

dijit wrote: post #112
jbk wrote: post #57

I'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…

Not sure if it means anything, but if I met you then you'd have unlimited guest time on my spare bed, and that would include food of course. Might not be much, but community respect and appreciation is something, it will definitely get you fed and beer'd. Although ideally you'd want to have the money not the admiration. :\

> Although ideally you'd want to have the money not the admiration. :\

Admiration is un-valuable. :D

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

#147

Post by anticsapp »

oars wrote: post #116
jbk wrote: post #57

I'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…

VLC has brought joy to my life and many others I know. In our short time in this world you literally helped make my and many others' lives better. Thank you.

I love VLC. You're a lead on that? Cool.

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

#149

Post by orlandohill »

karterk wrote: post #102

I've been working on Typesense ( https://github.com/typesense/typesense ) a developer-friendly typo-tolerant search engine that has found some love recently. While my work is currently done outside my core working hours, I've been exploring if it is possible to make it self-sustainable and have been reading about a few other people who have been successful at this. I think the trick is to make it possible for people…

h) License under the Parity Public License, and offer paid private licenses to companies that don't want to open source their code. https://paritylicense.com/ https://licensezero.com/

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

#150

Post by prepend »

generalpass wrote: post #145
rbultje wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This response reminds me of: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1258531455220609025 Opensource/free software powers most of the stuff we take for granted. The software and their maintainers are equally taken-for-granted.

I agree that the vast majority of people take a lot of open source for granted. However, a lot of open source projects are, frankly, extremely rude to users. Instead of some copy-paste "kindly please direct your question to this resource over here" the users get "GET THE @#%% OUT OF HERE STUPID N00b" and this is from people directly with the project (e.g., domain email address). If you think this doesn't impact your…

I’d like to see some nice analysis on this because my experience was completely the opposite.

I don’t work on open source much (a few lines over 20 years), but the only patch I made was super welcoming and a dev bent over backwards to teach me how to diff and submit patches. I just assumed this was common.

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