Alt text; An image showing a meme about open source software. The top part shows an elephant standing on a beach with text reading “The entire world’s IT infrastructure” superimposed on the elephant. Below this is a large, colorful beach ball being supported by tiny ants, with text reading “Unpaid open source devs.” The meme illustrates how the global IT ecosystem heavily relies on open source software that is often maintained by unpaid volunteer developers who carry a disproportionate burden despite their small numbers.

Source

  • Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
    43·
    17 hours ago

    Anyone having success with monetising their OS software? I have a library with many users that I recently switched to AGPL, but noone wants to pay for it to use it in their company.

    • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
      18·
      9 hours ago

      Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has written a little bit about his journey working on curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/10/26/working-open-source/

      I now work for wolfSSL. We sell curl support and related services to companies. Companies pay wolfSSL, wolfSSL pays me a salary and I get food on the table. This works as long as we can convince enough companies that this is a good idea.

      The vast majority of curl users out there of course don’t pay anything and will never pay anything. We just need a small number of companies to do it – and it seems to be working. We help customers use curl better, we make curl better for them and we make them ship better products this way. It’s a win win. And I can work on open source all day long thanks to this.

    • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
      11·
      7 hours ago

      The problem is the people who use the library don’t have access to the money. They’re just some dev trying to build something and your library is one of their 500 dependencies. The idea of needing to pay for a license means they have to stop building and get other people involved who may or may not approve, which may not be an option if they have a deadline. They will probably just try to find some work around to avoid this.

      I wonder if a better approach is to move hundreds of libraries into some kind of joint bundle (a humble bundle). Let companies buy access to them all with one procurement, and also you’ll have more negotiating power and pull if you have a bigger group.

    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
      41·
      16 hours ago

      For individual projects the way this usually works is one of the larger companies that rely on the project hires the developer as an employee to maintain the codebase full-time and help integrate it with their internal processes.

      Larger projects might form their own company and sell integration & support to other companies (e.g. Red Hat, Bitwarden).

      Otherwise you’re basically dependent on donations or government grants.

      There’s a Wikipedia article on this subject: Business models for open-source software

      And there’s various industry opinions:

      Demystifying the Open Source Business Model: A Comprehensive Explanation

      How to build a successful business model around open source software

      Open Source Business Models (UNICEF course)

      I think monetization is easier for user-facing software though, which a lot of this material is written around, and harder for projects like libraries.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      23·
      9 hours ago

      Why do you want to monetize it?

      You could create a donation page. If no one wants to donate it is probably because there isn’t a perceived benefit of the software.