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How to pay your rent with your open source project

plausible.io

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Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#61

Post by pankajdoharey »

boogies wrote: post #56
pankajdoharey wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say a lot of people yes but "Most" may not be accurate clearly there are more projects on github than there are companies which are funding OSS projects.

Are you implying that one company can't fund more than one project?

Nope even if one company funds 100 projects each we will still run out of companies that fund OSS projects, there are many more individual efforts some of them patreon funded but not all. And people have been writing OSS since 70's with or without funding.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#63

Post by pankajdoharey »

michaelt wrote: post #58
pankajdoharey wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say a lot of people yes but "Most" may not be accurate clearly there are more projects on github than there are companies which are funding OSS projects.

The results here are going to depend on if someone spending 1 hour a month on a project with 1 user, and someone spending 40 hours a week on a project with 10,000,000 users both count as 1 OSS developer.

True but I was referring to the ones who are not corporate funded but spent 20 Hours or so on OSS, all large OSS projects were dedicated personal projects for many yrs with a lot of users the funding may or may not be there, Before Industry realised Linux kernel is a strategic asset people were contributing patches and many many hours without funding.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#64

Post by pselbert »

mwcampbell wrote: post #47

How about dual licensing of the core software itself? That is, release the source under a copyleft license, and sell licenses to companies who won't accept the copyleft terms. For libraries and tools targeted at software developers, I think the Parity Public License [1] is a particularly good choice. Taking it further, we should be willing to challenge the strict parameters of the Open Source Definition, the Debian F…

Anecdotally I don’t believe dual licensing is viable for smaller projects. There simply aren’t enough companies that care about your license to make it a reliable business model.

This is something I explored initially for Oban[0] and I interviewed a few successful OSS product owners. They attributed zero sales to licensing. All sales were driven by features that a business needed once they had already invested in the core project.

[0] https://getoban.pro

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#65

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

open-source-ux wrote: post #15

There is another option, unpopular with some open source advocates, the source-only option. You simply sell your software product (with source code) for a price. That's it. Simple and uncomplicated. Your customers get the source of your app. They can modify the code to suit their needs. But unlike open source, they cannot re-distribute the app. Very few companies would object to this. Some popular and profitable proj…

Source Available[0] is a model, and it's fine, but it's proprietary software, not Open Source. I really wish people would stop inventing new terms for this or pretending that it's still "open source"; there's nothing wrong with writing proprietary software, just don't pretend that you're doing something else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#66

Post by ghengeveld »

For us, FOSS is the start of the funnel for our SaaS. Somewhat in-between the "hosted version" and the "premium features" buckets, but in separate projects.

We employ the two core maintainers of Storybook (one of the most popular FOSS JavaScript projects) who work on it full-time. The rest of us build Chromatic, a SaaS that offers features on top of Storybook, and we occasionally work on Storybook too.

Storybook is a tool for local development, so if a feature makes sense there, we add it to Storybook. If it needs some cloud connection/storage (e.g. for team collaboration), it becomes a Chromatic feature. We have a shared roadmap that doesn't prioritize one over the other, and Storybook has it's own steering committee.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#67

Post by mwcampbell »

ddevault wrote: post #54
mwcampbell wrote: post #47

How about dual licensing of the core software itself? That is, release the source under a copyleft license, and sell licenses to companies who won't accept the copyleft terms. For libraries and tools targeted at software developers, I think the Parity Public License [1] is a particularly good choice. Taking it further, we should be willing to challenge the strict parameters of the Open Source Definition, the Debian F…

We shall not challenge the OSI and FSF definitions, because every principle that they defend is not only worth protecting, but under attack by bad interests. "Challenging" these is how you end up being gaslit by companies which are abusing the open source brand to peddle software that isn't. And such muddying of the waters makes it easier for companies to disregard the terms of copyleft licenses. This is non-negotiab…

OK, the Prosperity license and others like it shouldn't be called open source. I should have been explicit about that, as I believe Kyle Mitchell (author of the two licenses I linked) is.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#68

Post by teraflop »

I feel like it's weird to first talk about aligning your incentives towards things that provide value to your users, and then suggest this business model:

> Training, support or consulting services from the project’s maintainers

without even mentioning that it creates exactly the opposite incentive.

If you get paid to help people understand how to get stuff done with your product, you have absolutely no reason to improve the core product in ways that make it easy for them to figure it out on their own.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#69

Post by rat9988 »

ddevault wrote: post #54
mwcampbell wrote: post #47

How about dual licensing of the core software itself? That is, release the source under a copyleft license, and sell licenses to companies who won't accept the copyleft terms. For libraries and tools targeted at software developers, I think the Parity Public License [1] is a particularly good choice. Taking it further, we should be willing to challenge the strict parameters of the Open Source Definition, the Debian F…

We shall not challenge the OSI and FSF definitions, because every principle that they defend is not only worth protecting, but under attack by bad interests. "Challenging" these is how you end up being gaslit by companies which are abusing the open source brand to peddle software that isn't. And such muddying of the waters makes it easier for companies to disregard the terms of copyleft licenses. This is non-negotiab…

I for one don't think that every principle they defend is worth protecting, nor I do fully agree with their definition. I'm not trying to convince you, just to say that some people have a different opinion.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#70

Post by 2can »

aurimask wrote: post #62
2can wrote: post #57

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I noticed that you have a typo on main page: "1KB script makes your wbsite faster and lighter."

Thank you. I will fix that.
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