Offer a cloud-based and support, on-prem, etc as paid tier extras
How to pay your rent with your open source project
151–160 of 171 posts
Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project
#152I asked this on HN a few days back. I open sourced a library and its become heavily used by some of the largest enterprises who make lot of money using that library as one of many. It takes a lot of my time to keep it updated so I would like to be compensated some how for the time it takes me away from my family Even though its used by small and medium businesses I would like only the largest businesses to pay for it…
CKEditor ( https://ckeditor.com/ ) releases their product using the GPL license. Most large business avoid the GPL since they don't want to release their own code in accordance with the GPL. CKSource, the company that releases CKEditor, sells commercial licences to those companies, and will issue free licenses to GPL-incompatible open source projects. https://ckeditor.com/pricing/
THIS RIGHT HERE.
the best ways i know of to make money doing OSS is charging for support and selling a commercial license so that enterprises can keep their code changes private.
Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project
#153I noticed that Plausible claims to measure traffic without being able to persistently identify users, but https://plausible.io/data-policy states that they store the following:
hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent)
Update: I mis-interpreted "rotating salt" to mean something that could be re-computed on Plausible's backend. It appears that the salt is random[1] and generated on the client-side, which makes this hash much more secure.
1. https://github.com/plausible/analytics/blob/master/lib/plaus...
Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project
#154I asked this on HN a few days back. I open sourced a library and its become heavily used by some of the largest enterprises who make lot of money using that library as one of many. It takes a lot of my time to keep it updated so I would like to be compensated some how for the time it takes me away from my family Even though its used by small and medium businesses I would like only the largest businesses to pay for it…
charging for support and giving companies MIT style license with their name attached as exclusive licensee for that version is the best way that I've found. New features and customizations have worked out well for me. Never made a ton of money but I've gone on a couple of vacations thanks to it. Usually you know who you're dealing with so charge accordingly.
Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project
#155I noticed that Plausible claims to measure traffic without being able to persistently identify users, but https://plausible.io/data-policy states that they store the following: hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent) There are optimizations that can help brute-force the enumeration of customer domains, browser UAs, and IP addresses (e.g. in some cases you could enumerate only residential ISPs). Up…
How can you know if an IP adress is residential or not? Are there API / list of know IP ranges?
Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project
#156I 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 imp…
Actually you do, stuff you do can be rolled back into your project. Not everything is binary. You can enjoy hacking on a project as well as making money on it.
Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project
#157There 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…
That model falls apart from the start. If anyone is savvy enough to compile from source then why buy it? If the code is free, then, I don't see how they'd even bother to pay for it; it being the compiled version; of course. It the source is out they can't hardly enforce anything or much. People will just go to github and compile it for free.
The people that are doing that wouldn't have bought it anyway. Most businesses that are legit will pay for what is required to be paid for to remain legal and not get sued.
Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project
#158I noticed that Plausible claims to measure traffic without being able to persistently identify users, but https://plausible.io/data-policy states that they store the following: hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent) There are optimizations that can help brute-force the enumeration of customer domains, browser UAs, and IP addresses (e.g. in some cases you could enumerate only residential ISPs). Up…
How can you know if an IP adress is residential or not? Are there API / list of know IP ranges?
It is possible to optimization enumeration of residential ISPs by subtracting datacenter IP addresses (among other tricks I would imagine).
I've targeted residential ISPs before in this project: https://eligrey.com/blog/zerodrop/
Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project
#159I noticed that Plausible claims to measure traffic without being able to persistently identify users, but https://plausible.io/data-policy states that they store the following: hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent) There are optimizations that can help brute-force the enumeration of customer domains, browser UAs, and IP addresses (e.g. in some cases you could enumerate only residential ISPs). Up…
How can you know if an IP adress is residential or not? Are there API / list of know IP ranges?
I'd think you can see who owns the IP range and check if it's some ISP... probably some api somewhere also... oooor just check the reverse dns and see if it's dyn.someISP
Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most direct way to monetisation I’ve seen in the community is writing a book or doing consulting. Maybe there are other ways that aren’t as visible to a casual observer.
So for someone trying to follow this path, basically I open source a library and try hard to get important people to adopt it, and then if/when they need more help using my code in their systems, they will pay me money to write the code for them instead of some other dev?
I assume yes because of your deep knowledge related to the package, whereas they don't have to spend time ramping up an in house dev to learn the ins and outs of it.