It is not to hard to make living off open source for a solo or very small team of developers. There are many revenue models around open source and they have been documented elsewhere. They include providing services like hosting (Wordpress.com) to support (RedHat), plugins (SugarCRM) and "Enterprise" editions (GitLab)

But each of the approaches requires that you get serious traction.

The key here is to stay independent of revenue for the longest time as you can. This is only possible if you are willing to work as a solo developer, working part-time till you hit certain traction numbers.

Open source is a hard and long game as a business. On the plus side, it is very satisfying and if you are able to sustain. There are many domains where open source is already winning big (OS, infrastructure, databases, web) and as new areas "fall" to open source, the risk on the closed-source side will also keep on increasing.

Well, long story short, if you want people to pay you, they need incentive to do so. And unfortunately, the MIT license provides no incentive to do so.

Those with the cash to spare and the desire to do so will donate, just as they always have. Those without either, will not donate, just as they always have.

It reads like a plee to a user's conscience, but lacks any teeth to have any more effect than any other permissively licensed donationware.

Best of luck, though.

This is already a solved problem. It's the author's Option 3, but without the silly guilt and donation pieces.

Dual license your thing so that it can be used commercially for a specified monthly fee, with a mechanism for paying that fee (and that fee being actually spelled out rather than handwaved at as in the article). You've written useful software. Charge for it.

Asking for donations physically can't work, as the commercial organizations you'd want to donate often don't have the legal ability to do so. They can buy things. They can't give money away.

Again, it's solved. The author just seems to feel bad about the solution, so he's trying to implement it while apologizing for every step. Seems a bit silly.

Option 4: sell support contracts. As @jasonkester mentioned, it's a lot easier for many companies to buy something than it is for them to donate. Red Hat became a billion dollar company doing this.

Support contracts put a lot of obligation on you, so should be priced accordingly (aka high). Combine it with #3 to give an out to those who can't afford and/or don't want the support contract.

One thing I'd recommend: have a way to invoice companies monthly who have agreed to pay you monthly.

For us: No invoice? No payment. (I'm not arguing whether that should or should not be a fact; I'm just stating that it is a fact for us and I doubt we're alone.)

The economic motivations that drive FOSS development haven't really been done justice in the peer-reviewed literature on the subject. We used to say "Money, Glory, and Fun" were the reasons, and to some extent that was and remains true. However, I think there's always been quite a lot more to it. After the collapse of the dot-com bubble, there were a LOT of developers, particularly junior level developers, who couldn't find the kind of work they wanted and hoped to find after college, and committing to Open Source projects was a great way to get a kind of apprenticeship with some of the best development teams in the world. Participating in those efforts exposed new developers to new ideas, new ways of building software with distributed development teams, and more often than not exposure to world-class software. The monetary value of that sort of software engineering apprenticeship is hard to gauge, as you typically can't get its equivalent in a corporate internship, and many university CS programs rightly prioritize computer science over software engineering skills.

Crowdfunding open-source projects can work and has worked to get them going, but the "big bang" model of crowdfunding -- a single large payment at the beginning -- has two problems. First, you have to persuade people of the usefulness of your product before they actually have a chance to try it out. This is sometimes possible, but often difficult. Secondly, as anyone in the software business knows, most of the cost of a mature software product is in the maintenance, which can stretch on for years, not the initial development.

For these reasons I think a different approach to crowdfunding is needed: one that is finer-grained, collecting smaller amounts of money for smaller units of work, and that is designed to work on an ongoing basis.

The reason I think this could work is that the developers of a successful open-source product actually do have something to sell: their time. There are always bugs to fix and new features to implement, and crowdfunding contributions can be a way for users to vote on what they want done next.

I am really, really struggling to understand how someone can make a voluntary and conscious decision to release software for free, under a license that permits unlimited redistribution, and then call the people who follow the terms of the license they explicitly chose "freeloaders."

I like the idea of running crowd funding campaigns to release software as open source. This could be done for certain milestones (like feature X or platform Y) in a longer running or bigger project. I would even think it's fair if the developer included a maintenance cost into the amount he wants to gather before releasing the software.

It's clear to users what they are giving money for. Also the incentive is bigger to contribute because before the amount is reached, the code isn't released. And for the developer, it's more predictable than donations.

Of course, this still wouldn't work so well for maintenance heavy projects that don't gain a lot of features, like security sensitive infrastructure like openssl.

I think it might be an interesting approach to run a kickstarter-style campaign for each major software release, and once the goal is reached, release the software with a normal open source license. Nothing would stop other developers from forking the software, but if the author was providing enough value, I believe people would contribute.

I have one particular open source project that I started back in college that's actually paid off a little bit over the years as it's become more mature. In total, I've probably received ~$20k between custom development and commercial licenses (it's AGPL, so option #2 in the article). However, given the amount of time I've put into it, it still pays less than my current job, and probably even most of the jobs I had in college.

Most of my other open source work gets released as MIT and I have zero expectation of getting any direct money from it. (Although, my open source work has undoubtedly helped me get my current and most of my recent jobs, so there is a fair argument that it's earning me money indirectly.)

I have a kickstarter project that's surpassed it's funding goal to support the development of a not-yet-existing open source project. Im 99% sure it succeeded because I'm already entrenched in the community it is targeted at, which doesn't help the diversity angle. It is encouraging for me because it allows me to dedicate myself exclusively to open source for the remainder of the year.

I wont link to the campaign but the repo is here: https://github.com/enjalot/building-blocks

The best way to monetize open source it to sell optional plugins and services around your core open source product. This isn't always possible though - It depends heavily on what your project does and how it's designed.

Generally; open source platforms, frameworks and operating systems are easy to monetize because they are at the base of the software stack - They own the environment in which people build apps.

Libraries and modules, on the other hand, are difficult to monetize because they are only small parts of an environment over which they have no control.

Fitting copyable things into the capitalist market economy is something of an unsolved problem.

No it's not, it's the same problem that market economies have been dealing with since the invention of the printing press... the solution was a legal and financial concept known as "copyright".

I remember the battle in the 90s. Slashdot vs. the MPAA/RIAA. The "good guys" who were for "freedom of information" and the "bad guys" who wanted to limit what we could do with our technology and make it illegal to circumvent copyright protections...

...and then the "good guys" won! DVD John, Napster... information must be free!

It's quite clear that anti-circumvention laws were not the best approach (they should have put those resources in to things like SoundExchange much earlier), these negative aspects of copyright have unfortunately dominated the conversation since.

Fast forward a decade, and what do we have... well, we're starting to see what happens when you get rid of treating intellectual property as something that can exist as something to be bought and sold in a market economy.

It's not like the whole concept of private property or ownership went away. For the people who own stocks in Google, Apple, Facebook and the other billion dollar companies who deal in distributing and organizing digital media, they've made plenty of money.

Open-source software is funded by corporate coffers. The people who make the software don't get to own anything while the corporations get to use these freely created tools to increase their share values. The vast majority of open-source developers are on corporate payrolls.

Not only are developers giving away their intellectual property, but so are the majority of individuals who the create digital media that drives the eyeballs to the advertisements. The "creative commons", where everyone freely distributes their creations in exchange for comments and clicks...

It is quite clear that digital media does have value. If Google had nothing to index, or if Facebook had nothing to share, there would be no one using these services, and therefor no one to sell any advertisements to.

Yet we have no way to price how much this media is worth. It never enters a marketplace. It is never bought and sold. I'm not sure what kind of creative accounting they have at places like Twitter but I'm sure they don't have a good idea of their actual business inputs and outputs. There's a giant air-gap between users creating content and advertisers buying space next to it.

Because of the fundamental economics of refusing to considering digital media as intellectual property in a market economy, the only profit model is to make the services free and then degrade the products through adding noise to the channel. Now product designers have to actively fight with their organizations profit structures. The result? Crappy and bloated products with crappy content, a plague that has been sweeping web publishing that seems to be increasing by the day if the tech blogosphere is used as a thermometer.

Advertisements do not pay for content. They pay for hosting, distribution and employee salaries. They pay to keep the lights on in Mountain View.

All sorts of hair-brained schemes are dreamt up to try and deal with it, but none actually treat digital media as property. Kickstarter is about the project. The people who support a project are not investors. They don't get equity or ownership, they get t-shirts. Patreon is about the artist. The people who support the artists don't get equity or ownership, just a "worthless" digital media file. Artists are told to sell merchandise and tickets and in-home performances and anything and everything under the sun other than what they are best at making, an absurdity that defines the early 21st century media landscape, as if somehow we can fix this problem if we just convince enough people that they need a closet filled with hundreds of "I supported an artist" t-shirts.

The only place where intellectual property is still honored is with the old giants of the 20th century, the book, music and moving pictures industries. These industries were built on top of the foundations of copyright. Artists create, own, and put their property on an actual marketplace. Companies who own IP and treat it as such on their books have a clearly defined view of their "content creation" accounts as being profit-makers. Speculative investment through publishers creates an incentive structure that aligns itself with the rest of our market economy.

The digital music industry has already ceded the battle to IT. When Sony negotiated with Spotify to put their back-catalog on this new service, they had the presence of mind to know that what really mattered was equity in Spotify. Their recordings and publishing rights were "worthless". A rival service named Tidal offered it's artists ownership in the corporation as opposed to contracts related to their IP for the same reason. Seemingly out of nowhere we're seeing a drastic increase in vinyl records, but I would argue this is less a hipster trend than a return to an economics model where the music itself is given value.

What I find interesting and ironic is that an industry built on information has not only conceded that information is worthless but celebrates this fact. Then we dream up things like "basic income" in order to create a world where the 99% who don't own anything can survive. We're all well aware of the relationship that labor has to capital. We're all well aware of the economic reality of scarce physical resources. In the real world, not everyone can own something. However, anyone has the ability to create intellectual property out of thin air and benefit from owning it like any other capital.

Somehow we blindly believe that things like basic income seem easier to implement on a societal level than accounting for ownership of digital media. We'd rather throw private property out the window then deal with it's complexities. Haven't we been here before?

---

I'd love some feedback on this stuff and I know some of these ideas are half-baked, but everywhere I look I'm seeing the same root issue... we've decided to give up on hundreds of years of treating intellectual creations as property that can be bought and sold in a marketplace, and doing so we've made it very hard for people who make digital media, be it a software library or a song, to survive in a world built on top of private physical property.