
Ask HN: How to Profit from a FOSS Project? - MarcellusDrum
Without going into too much details, I&#x27;m working on an online teaching platform for schools and universities. I&#x27;m a strong believer in the Free Software ideology, and would like to license my project as such.<p>The project would be self hosted by the institution, and I want to profit from it. Is there a way to sell licenses for usage even though the source code is available freely? Can someone fork my project, change a few tiny details and the name and provide it for free without licenses?<p>Would having the project be free of price, but selling &quot;support&quot; worth it, or would they just rely on their IT department and not bother with buying it?<p>The idea of FOSS sounded better as a consumer than as a supplier tbh, so I would like to know your opinion about this.
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gus_massa
The other two sibling comments are probably better, but a few additional
remakes anyway.

I think it's very difficult to make money from a Free Software project. It is
somewhat possible from a Source Available project, but not easy.

The elephant in the room is Moodle. Everyone is using Moodle. It is GPL3. It
is an pragmatic/opinionated project, so you can find people that don't like it
or that want some special feature.

Perhaps you want to read about the AGPL licence, it forces people to share the
changes in they servers, even if they don't redistribute them. [I prefer
Apache or MIT, but it is even more difficult to make money with them unless
your project is huge.]

Some people share the [A]GPL version for free, but charge for the same code
under a not viral licence. If you accept contributions, you probably need a
ask for a CLA (contributor license agreement) so _you_ can change the licence
for the payed version. [I really don't like projects with a CLA. They are not
free enough for me.]

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Iolaum
I 'd suggest the Red Hat model. Copyleft code, trademarked name, make money
from support. It has good synergies in incentive alignment between you and the
community (that may hopefully materialise) around the project and a track
record of success.

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mindcrime
_Is there a way to sell licenses for usage even though the source code is
available freely?_

You can definitely sell F/OSS for a profit. One could quibble about the
semantics of whether or not you're really selling a license for "usage" or
not, but I don't think that's a particularly useful distinction. Maybe the
more important point is to understand that you're not _really_ selling
software in a sense. Yes, you could choose to not make binaries available
unless the customer pays, but they could always build their own binaries, or
get them from a third party.

So why do organizations pay companies for F/OSS at all? Well, there is the
support aspect, but its not just "support" as in patches / version upgrades,
and phone/email/web/whatever technical support. Those things are aspects of
what an organization is paying for, but they're also paying for something more
subtle. Organizations, especially larger ones, want stability and continuity.
By paying your company, instead of just using your software for free, they are
investing in the continued development and evolution of your project. And,
yes, they're also paying to have "somebody to sue" if the shit hits the fan.
Large organizations want contracts and legally binding commitments around
things, and they understand that that costs money.

 _Can someone fork my project, change a few tiny details and the name and
provide it for free without licenses?_

Pretty much, yeah. You can protect trademarks, and you can always choose the
route of not making the documentation available under a license that permits
redistribution, and do other small things to discourage a third party from
setting up to sell the same thing. But the licenses (I'm assuming some more or
less standard, common-place, OSD compliant license) generally permit that.

 _Would having the project be free of price, but selling "support" worth it,
or would they just rely on their IT department and not bother with buying it?_

It depends. There would probably always be "cheapskate" orgs that would
download and use the code and never engage with you. That's just part of the
cost of doing business. But many organizations _will_ buy your package,
assuming it creates value for them, for the reasons mentioned above. Not to
mention, their internal IT departments are probably already overworked,
underfunded, and stretched thin. They would _prefer_ to outsource the
maintenance and evolution of the thing, as opposed to taking on that
responsibility themselves.

 _The idea of FOSS sounded better as a consumer than as a supplier tbh, so I
would like to know your opinion about this._

It's not for everybody. There are a lot of implications to "selling F/OSS" and
you should think through them carefully and do your research before deciding.
I kinda feel like this topic has been beaten to death online over the last 15
or 20 years, so there's plenty of discussion of these points for you to read
over and consider. See:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=open+source+business+models](https://www.google.com/search?q=open+source+business+models)

One thing I would suggest, if you haven't yet, is to read

 _Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law_ by
Lawrence Rosen.

[https://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm](https://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm)

