
Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize? - techspring
I don&#x27;t own&#x2F;lead any significant open source projects, but it seems like there are very few projects that even attempt to monetize via dual-licensing, service contracts, etc. Is there some major barrier to monetiziation (i.e. legal fees)? Is it a philosophical barrier?
======
jashmenn
Because monetizing your open-source project means you take on a second job.

Here are your choices:

* Turn your OSS project into a company (Docker). The pro is that you can capture a lot of the value, the con is that you're splitting your project into CE/EE and also now you're a CEO

* Give the software away for free and charge for the hosting (Gitlab). Pro here is that you get recurring revenue, but the con is that now you're in DevOps and wear a pager. Also this model doesn't work well for libraries, only "apps".

* Charge for support (Ubuntu, Nginx-ish). Pro here is that by helping folks implement your software, you'll have a long line of success stories. Con here is that it isn't scalable - your upside is bounded by the hours you can bill

* Get a job at a company that will fund you to work on it (React, Angular). Pro here is that you can make tons of money with a job you love. Nice work, if you can get it. Con is that now you work for that company and you're subject to whatever whims they have.

* Run a Kickstarter (Light Table, Diaspora). Pro: you can gauge demand and you don't have a boss. Cons: it's one-time revenue, you have potentially inflated expectations, and just kidding, now you have 1,000 bosses.

* Run a Patreon (Vue). Pro: you have autonomy and recurring revenue (yay!). Con: now you're a personality. This is limited to celebs who are good at marketing _themselves_ as much as their software

* Ask for donations (Babel, Webpack). Pro: this works for tools and libraries (not just apps) and you can keep your mission. Con: Companies feel these donations have ambiguous deliverables. There's a lot of mental overhead too (How many projects can one company fund per month?)

* Sell documentation, books, videos (React Training, my current gig). Pro: JavaScript fatigue makes you money! Con: Writing the docs isn't as satisfying as writing software (for many developers)

So to answer your question: monetizing your open-source project means you take
on another job _besides writing software_.

In an ideal world if you write software and it gets used, you'd be able to
capture some share of that value. But we're not there yet.

[If you want to chat more about funding OSS, reach out to me (see my profile).
I'm working on a few new ideas.]

~~~
Mz
_Ask for donations (Babel, Webpack). Pro: this works for tools and libraries
(not just apps) and you can keep your mission. Con: Companies feel these
donations have ambiguous deliverables. There 's a lot of mental overhead too
(How many projects can one company fund per month?)_

I don't write software, but I have run various small websites for something
like 15+ years. I have always gotten more donation money than ad money off my
projects. I switched to a tip jar (last year, iirc) and that further improved
my take. (It isn't much, but it beats the figures I have seen quoted by most
people when data has been asked for on HN. I also don't get much traffic. For
the traffic involved, I think it is pretty good.)

I have also seen Patrick McKenzie talk about the fact that he won't donate
money to open source, but if you are willing to write an invoice for him, he
is happy to give you money. The reason is that he needs to justify his
business expenses on his tax returns and a "donation" is charity that he can't
justify to the government, but an invoice for a product he uses in his work is
a legit tax deduction. He has talked about how he thinks open source should
make invoicing business customers painless. I don't readily have a source at
my fingertips, but I bet someone on HN can come up with a link.

A compendium of my own writing about tip jars:
[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/search?q=tip+jar](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/search?q=tip+jar)

~~~
dasmoth
Interesting idea...

Original source could be the tweet embedded in
[https://supso.org/blog/funding-open-source-by-rethinking-
the...](https://supso.org/blog/funding-open-source-by-rethinking-the-
assumption)

~~~
Mz
I don't follow his tweets, so that is unlikely in this case. It is vastly more
likely to have been a comment somewhere on HN that I happened to read. (But
that's a really great source you have linked to. Thank you.)

------
CiPHPerCoder
I've tried it. I've failed at it.

Halite is a libsodium wrapper for PHP projects that emphasizes ease-of-use and
difficulty to misuse:
[https://github.com/paragonie/halite](https://github.com/paragonie/halite)

CMS Airship is a secure-by-default content management system (think WordPress,
Drupal, Joomla, etc.):
[https://github.com/paragonie/airship](https://github.com/paragonie/airship)

Both projects are released under GPL but offer commercial licenses. In two
years, I've only had one person ever inquire about a commercial license, and
they backed out.

One of the libraries I wrote has an installed base of (not counting WordPress)
over 28 million, yet I rarely hear from its users:
[https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie/random_compat](https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie/random_compat)

The barrier isn't legal or philosophical, it's that a lot of very useful open
source software (especially libraries that developers interface with) are
infrastructure rather than window dressing, which is largely _invisible_ to
organizations.

If you only develop window-dressing libraries, then the stuff 'patio11 has
said here over the years might hold true. But if you're trying to build a more
secure Internet by giving developers better tools, nobody wants to pay you for
that.

~~~
mrleinad
Do you have any stats on how many people use the first two products?

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
Roughly 15,000 for Halite
[https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie/halite](https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie/halite)

Less than 10 for Airship. There's a lot of reasons for that, though (aside
from the fact that we built it to be Tor-friendly, so it's nontrivial to
measure how many installs exist in the world): We only supported PostgreSQL
and only users capable of installing libsodium from PECL could use it. PHP 7.2
will make it possible for everyone to use Airship version 2, and MySQL 8 will
add CTEs so we might be able to support the more mainstream database.
[https://wiki.php.net/rfc/libsodium](https://wiki.php.net/rfc/libsodium)

------
pkamb
I have a little open-source Mac utility where the source code is available on
GitHub:

[https://github.com/pkamb/PowerKey](https://github.com/pkamb/PowerKey)

I then sell a compiled version signed with my Apple Developer ID via Gumroad:

[https://gumroad.com/l/powerkey](https://gumroad.com/l/powerkey)

This model works pretty well for small apps that you otherwise want to keep in
a public repo. The hassle of compiling + signing the app is worth $5 to many
people.

For anyone dabbling with the idea, I can't recommend Gumroad enough for
simplicity. But it would be nice to see payment/storefront functionality built
into GitHub's Releases feature. A GitHub sanctioned payment system might even
clue some creators in to the fact that you _can_ charge for some component of
your open source work.

~~~
akavel
There's also a quite well known sprite/pixel art editing/drawing application,
named Aseprite, which has a similar model - the author sells it as a paid app
in its compiled form, though he also makes the full source available on
GitHub. I have huge respect for him for that, and that it seems to work for
him!

[https://www.aseprite.org/](https://www.aseprite.org/)

------
mobitar
Because monetizing any business is really really hard. I work on Standard
Notes ([https://standardnotes.org](https://standardnotes.org)), which is an
encrypted notes app (think of it as an encrypted Evernote alternative). It's
fully open source, and I'm monetizing it through paid upgrades.

While the progress is promising enough for me to continue working on it full
time, nothing could have prepared me for how difficult this was going to be. I
had always been under the illusion that if you had a product you wanted to
sell, and there was demand for it, then an automatic transaction takes place.

Not so.

Not so at all. It requires understanding your users, learning about their
preferences, learning how to re-engage with them, learning to keep them
interested and engaged, and learning how to position your product as one
people want to buy.

All of this is very very hard, especially if you don't have a marketing
background. It is surpassable though. It just takes time. I'm doing this full
time and I still can't keep up. I can't imagine how you could possibly
monetize a project part time, unless you're committed enough to spend the next
five years of your life on it.

~~~
Gracana
Just a heads-up, standardnotes.org is very broken (big area of overlapping
text) in IE11.

~~~
mobitar
Oh no, thanks for the heads up. Will take a look.

------
bad_user
People don't pay unless forced to do it. In other works, people only pay when
there's _scarcity_.

What drives our economy? Scarcity. What's the long term effect of capitalism?
Commoditization, i.e. driving the costs down. Some people view open source as
being about a post-scarcity economy in which human labor isn't need, an
economy based on abundance. That's bullshit though. Open source is about
commoditizing software developers in order to increase profits.

So the answer to your question is that there are only 2 ways to commoditize
open-source:

1\. make it a complementary to something proprietary and sell that instead;
the " _open core_ " model is known to work well for some companies

2\. choose a restrictive license to make it useless for the target audience
(e.g. GPL / AGPL for libraries)

You'll notice that I'm not mentioning _selling support_. Some consultants
earned their name by contributing to open-source. But you can also write
books, or blogs and you'd probably earn a bigger following. And you're still
selling your own personal time, which is limited, as there are only 24 hours
in a day, you're probably not a rockstar to have obscene hourly rates and if
you're thinking of building a company around supporting open source, just
don't, as you're not Red Hat and you'll never be.

~~~
Ologn
> What drives our economy? Scarcity... Some people view open source as being
> about a post-scarcity economy in which human labor isn't need, an economy
> based on abundance. That's bullshit though.

I don't think that is the case at all.

If I have a woodshop and a customer comes in and hands me wood and nails, and
I spend a day banging together a table for them, at the end of the day there
is one table. A scarce good - one table is created, no more.

If I spent a day coding an Android app, publish it on Google Play, and it
takes off and Android's daily two billion users take to it, my day's worth of
work is not used by one person or one family. It is used by two billion
people. Perhaps my app is mostly based on gluing together open source Android
libraries and non-Android-specific libraries for the open source Android OS.

There is a scarcity and labor needed for the creation of the table or the app.
The difference in the case of the app which almost for free goes out to two
billion people, is that it's virtually free to copy and distribute it. It's
really not even a commodity any more.

~~~
bad_user
> _If I have a woodshop and a customer comes in and hands me wood and nails,
> and I spend a day banging together a table for them, at the end of the day
> there is one table. A scarce good - one table is created, no more._

That's natural scarcity. We also have _artificial scarcity_ imposed by laws
and technology.

If you think that's unfair, I might agree morally speaking, but then we'd end
up talking about how we're actually debating Marx's "labor theory of value"
(i.e. value is given by the total amount of labor required to produce it),
which was fundamentally flawed.

~~~
crpatino
What makes Labor Theory of Value _fundamentally_ flawed? The fact that it has
the letters M, A, R and X tied to its authoriship?

I agree that toilling at useless task adds zero value in the best case -more
often than not, it adds negative value by creating commitments to perform
further useless tasks in the future- but what is so wrong with considering
costs of production within the value added? I think it makes more sense to
recognize zero (or negative) value added task for what they are instead of
declaring them "marginally valueable" and then try to push the externality of
their cost unto others.

------
stevejohnson
If the project is maintained in someone's spare time, then the cost to
monetize it, in time and effort, might exceed what they are willing to put
into it.

In my own case, I have a silly JS library with 4,000 hits per month to the
docs, but "monetizing" that just sounds like work, whereas working on the
library itself is fun.

------
thibaut_barrere
Following the example of Sidekiq (with Sidekiq Pro), I'm in the process of
launching a commercial offering for Kiba ETL (OSS Ruby ETL framework -
[http://www.kiba-etl.org](http://www.kiba-etl.org)), dubbed "Kiba Pro".

My take on this is that more developers could try to follow that path, but we
lack a bit of guidance (I'm lucky Mike Perham provided some useful insights to
guide me actually) to reduce the anxiety & uncertainty associated with such
launches.

The hurdles can be numerous & blocking:

\- IP - making sure your consulting contracts are IP-safe

\- Proper pricing (how do you segment your offer? how to avoid pricing
"ceiling" effect etc)

\- Distribution (e.g. I'm using
[http://packagecloud.io](http://packagecloud.io) for our "paid gem")

\- Proper custom ToS

\- Product related theory such as "how to create leads channels" etc

\- Billing & invoicing

\- etc

Personally, I've decided not to attempt to "monetize" the OSS part, but rather
launch a paid counterpart covering more advanced uses or built-in components.

~~~
siscia
I am in the process of doing something similar with rediSQL
[[https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL](https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL)].

I would love any further feedback you can share.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I will definitely share more in a future blog post (subscribe at
[http://thibautbarrere.com](http://thibautbarrere.com)). Emailing you to make
sure you have the information.

~~~
siscia
Great, thanks :)

------
orthecreedence
I run an open source project (turtlapp.com). I want to monetize. I have people
who tell me fairly often they want to pay for it.

There are two things that hold me back. First is never quite feeling like it's
ready to charge for (perfect being the enemy of good). Second is I don't know
how much time I can devote to supporting it.

Both are stupid reasons. I know this. I'm hoping to launch a premium service
soon, and we'll see where it goes. If I spend 5 hours a day supporting it,
I'll probably just shut it all off and prioritize my Turtl emails a bit lower
like I do now. If I end up spending an hour or two a day on it and make some
money, I'll kick myself for not doing it earlier.

~~~
iamwil
Just start charging. You'll want to know earlier rather than later which one
it is. Life is short. If it turns out this is not the thing you should be
working on, knowing which one it is will free your mind up to do something
else you should be doing.

~~~
orthecreedence
Great advice. It's funny because I already _know_ this, it's logical and the
decision makes sense in every way, but I still have trouble _doing_ it. I've
got a nice chunk of nights/weekends in July, maybe I'll make the final push
then.

~~~
iamwil
Yeah, I know the feeling. It's usually some mental block, or erroneous belief
you have that's held by those in your circle, or something you identify with.
Sometimes it's a fear. But either way, it's usually a bug in the way you're
seeing the world.

Once you can identify the bug, it'll be easier to know what's making you
hesitate. What's the basic belief you have about money and business that's
held in your social circle, or attached to your identity?

------
franciscop
To answer this I would ask what is the biggest reason to do Open Source. As an
individual, the _main_ reason to do that last step and publishing what I do as
open source is so other people can use+benefit from it and monetizing it would
hinder this.

Now there are many great secondary reasons as an individual, in no particular
order: I learn a lot, I got some paying gigs from my open source, better code
through more eyeballs, it builds curriculum/personal brand, it feels good to
be complimented, etc. For companies I'll guess also it's a great recruiting
tool as you are not a name in the dark but you show your code (I've considered
that when looking for a job).

Oh wait, I totally (honestly) forgot about your main question when listing the
benefits. I would say that the common feeling (at least in JS world) is that
open source does not give _direct_ money, so few projects start with the
intention of getting it and later on it's more difficult.

If you try to do it there is a whole topic on this:
[https://opensource.guide/getting-paid/](https://opensource.guide/getting-
paid/)

To OP, since you've opened this discussion would you please share your
thinking as well?

~~~
indigochill
Another reason some companies publish open source code is to recruit
contributors. Contributors already know what they're doing and are clearly
passionate enough about the product to spend time on it for free, so they may
be a natural hire when a position opens.

~~~
exelius
I think you're vastly overstating it.

The main reason most companies open source stuff is because they had to build
something for some reason or another, the thing works, but they don't want to
maintain it because it's plumbing and it's not mission-critical.

Sometimes it's easier to throw the thing on GitHub (where others might find it
and at least use it) than throw it in your company's internal repository
(where nobody will ever find it and it will rot away).

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Citation needed!

Most of the time it's much easier to leave stuff in internal repos than doing
the effort to review and approve stuff for publishing.

------
davidw
It's very difficult to do well is why.

* It changes the dynamics of the project when other people see you're making money on it.

* Dual licensing might hamper adoption.

* Service contracts are not easy to work out, and the better your code is, the less likely people are to even need them.

------
bsears
Our startup is in the process of launching an open source product and
monetizing (currently) by offering it as a SaaS solution. People will be
willing to pay for something if it's going to make their life easier

The trouble with monetizing open source is that if your project isn't a "full
product" like wordpress, gitlab, or discourse with a well designed interface
and plugin support you don't really have a way to sell the product as a
service which I think is the most lucrative way and you can then start adding
premium features to this service if you want to go down the open core route.

------
yesimahuman
We are monetizing Ionic Framework right now. Two things we're doing: premium
tools/services on top of the core (our Creator product is leading that
charge), and then additional product features for enterprise, which does have
"support" aspects to it, but that's in support of their use of a product. Kind
of hard to avoid selling any kind of software for lots of $ without someone
being able to contact you in a prioritized way.

------
neumino
Because most of the time you can't monetize it enough to be able to escape
your day job.

So at the end of the day, it's just beer money, and just creates more
headaches (legal, taxes etc.)

------
pierotofy
Read "Why do people keep contributing to these projects, when they’re not
getting paid for it?" (Page 53) from "Road and Bridges" by Nadia Eghbal. It
has a very good analysis.
[https://fordfoundcontent.blob.core.windows.net/media/2976/ro...](https://fordfoundcontent.blob.core.windows.net/media/2976/roads-
and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf)

------
PaulHoule
Apart from the causes, the reality is that very few companies have been
successful at monetizing open source, and many of the ones that do only appear
to be successful because of "echo chamber" effects.

Red Hat Linux is the main counterexample. Companies do pay for their support,
but CentOS nips at their heels and Red Hat has also lost the support of the
"enthusiast" community which has largely gone to Ubuntu.

Cloudera is an example of the kind of "hype-driven" company that gets taken
seriously because they get written about in TechCrunch every few days, but
they don't have any unique selling point, particularly compared to the free
Hadoop distribution. When they got started, the idea of offering a GUI client
seemed like a good idea, but after the devops revolution this became value
subtraction instead of value addition. (Why click hundreds of times through
multiple forms to set up a cluster and have to repeat the whole process all
over again next time you build a cluster when you can type a few commands, hit
ENTER and have it be done?)

~~~
Pyxl101
Not to diminish your point about CentOS interacting with RedHat's business
model, but note that RedHat acquired CentOS in Jan 2014:

[https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-
announce/2014-Janu...](https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-
announce/2014-January/020100.html)

------
jerf
I think it's that A: you have to have a _huge_ open source project for the 1%
of the 1% of your audience who will actually pay in any useful quantity to be
big enough to support you and B: by the time you've grown to that size, you
must have found some way to become that large without the direct monetization,
so you may not feel much of a need.

------
lumberjack
I think it's better to see open source software as "cost reducing" rather than
"revenue generating". Consider for example HHMV, developed by Facebook. The
way to monetize your open source project is to get adopted/hired by the
biggest commercial entity who makes use of your project.

------
kakwa_
Monetizing, or at least trying to monetize can be kind of counter productive
for many projects, specially smaller ones.

Personally, I have a few projects on Github that seems to be somewhat useful
to other people... but not a lot people (my most "successful" project has 61
stars, not bad for a side project but ridiculous if you compare it with big
projects in the thousands of stars).

Trying to monetize it doesn't worth the burden, maybe I could get a few bucks
with Patreon or gratipay, but I would need between 100 to a 1000 times what I
could reasonably expect to be given to make a living out of it.

Monetizing them also means I would have some moral obligation to maintain them
properly. This really depends on your view on the question, but for me it's
kind of import. Right now, I try to respond to bugs and PR as fast as I can,
but if I'm feeling lazy or if the issue is to complex to be fix, I can leave
it opened for months. Maintenance is purely best effort.

I've started these projects for various reasons, but one common denominator is
that they enabled me to learn some stuff and/or maintain my competences (setup
proper unit tests, documentation in rst, more advanced knowledge of Python,
de-rusting my C, cmake, OpenSSL programming, Puppet types and resources...).
One other side effect is that these projects give proof and credibility of
what is written on my CV, so, in fact, it's not completely un-monetized...

Also, another driver for publishing these projects is: "why should I keep that
to myself? it might be useful to other people" and even if it's not, GitHub is
a convenient place to store code ^^.

I'm speaking for my personal projects, but I think I'm far from being an
exception, big OSS projects that can be monetized are the exception, they are
often core components (a kernel, a big library or framework, a big piece of
infrastructure...), but many more smaller projects live (and die) around them
serving their small purpose (if any).

------
JohnStrange
Do you have any numbers to support your premise? "Few" is relative and in the
eye of the beholder, and I personally don't have the impression that only few
projects 'monetize'. There are a lot of commercial open source projects, I
find out about a new one almost every day. However, you may be right if what
you want to say is that only a small _percentage of the total number of open
source projects_ monetize. The same probably holds for proprietary software,
too, most of it is in-house or developed by hobbyists and only few proprietary
software projects successfully 'monetize'. And let's also not forget that the
vast majority of all projects, be they open source or not, are probably
abandoned/given up.

~~~
AstralStorm
The most interesting one from the failed business perspective is Blender,
commercial project turned open-source via a bounty.

------
nobodyorother
I've been encouraging a 5% philosophy for organizations that replace software
that had license fees with free software:

Just donate 5% of the previous annual license fee to the project you're now
using, each year. You still save 95% on license fees and developers get to
eat.

~~~
techspring
I like this, but I can imagine it being a hard sell even at just 5%.

------
JustSomeNobody
Motivation? Programming has always had a strong undercurrent of sharing.
Programmers want to read the code. Programmers want to share how they
accomplished something.

That being said, you will likely get different answers on HN than you would
on, say, r/programming or IRC.

------
jorgemf
When you open source a project you don't always want to monetize that project
but it fits in your plan to make money. For example big companies release open
source projects so the community get expertise in their tools which means it
will be cheaper to hire people with that expertise and it becomes easier to
move the community to use your other paid tools. Another example to open
source a project it is because it is not a key thing in your product and you
can have people to use it at the same time they help you to maintain it. You
can open source your pet projects so they gave visibility to you and makes
easier to find a job.

Monetize it is not always the goal.

------
devnonymous
Open Source Projects is a broad term. It could include a pet project with to
large scale projects like the Linux kernel with a few thousand developers.

Here are some of the reasons monetizing is either not feasible or not
desirable:

* for small projects, most contribution is done in free time by one or a handful of maintainers for a most part and some random flyby contributions every once in a while. In such cases monetizing would imply more work that distracts from the primary work of building software and the maintainers do not want to spend their free time doing that.

* even for slightly larger projects that possibly commercial companies depend upon, monetizing would imply a change in prioritisation in what gets done. The maintainers would be obligated to invest their free time in doing what paying customers need rather than what the community or the maintainers themselves want.

* for even larger projects unless the interest reaches the threshold where the maintainer(s) can quit their day job and depend on the money coming in from the monetizing it just eats into their free time for not enough money

There are other reasons as well about how to come with a scheme where those
contributing do not feel like they are submitting patches just so that the
maintainer(s) get to make money for their work, or just the principle of the
thing about paying it forward to the community they got so much free (as in
beer) knowledge and experience from.

------
michaelbrave
My best idea how to monetize would be to

1\. Start a convention around it, which could be profitable 2\. sell swag,
T-shirts and the like (lets say it's a limited quantity that can only be
bought by contributors, then it becomes a prized way to show off) 3\. in app
purchases, for example if I made a photoshop equivalent, but had it linked up
to a font store. 4\. Get companies/governments that use your software to give
you Grants.

That's all I've got that hasn't already been covered. I know a few open source
guys who just feel dirty about getting money for it. Personally I'm the same
when I make art, I don't want it to be a job, when it starts becoming a job I
stop enjoying it, and every time I've taken a break from art in my life it's
because it started feeling oppressive like a job. As I learn to code, and as I
start to enjoy it, I worry that a similar feeling may happen, in which case I
may have an open source project or two on the side just for funzies while I
have my moneymaking job separate. I think I would be happier with such an
arrangement.

------
fundamental
Echoing the sentiment of other posters, monetization doesn't make much sense
for many projects (beyond accepting tips) as it's more work to do without much
$ in return. For success you'd need to invest time into marketing, revamping
the website(s), changing how you present deliverables to (paying) users, setup
payment processing, come up with a set of plans for various funding levels,
etc.

This may rarely work out, otherwise it's a lot of work for below minimum wage.
I tried to see if there was enough out there for one project I've been working
on for years ( [http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net](http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net) ) and my
attempt (like several others in related communities) was a flop. It was
interesting from an experience side of things, but in the end the project was
too niche to support itself (like I'd imagine most open-source work is).

------
kazinator
> _but it seems like there are very few projects that even attempt to monetize
> via dual-licensing, service contracts, etc._

You don't know everything about the activities of open-source developers with
regard to their project. They may be involved in service contracts and dual
licensing, without that being advertised on their project site.

~~~
techspring
That's fair. My observation is admittedly entirely anecdotal.

------
johannes1234321
One important aspect is attracting contributors: Many potential contributors
don't like investing time in a project, where one entity has a notable benefit
from the unpaid work. If you don't have monitisation in mind in the project
everybody interacts on an more equal level.

------
watwut
Large open source projects have companies or foundations behind them. Project
being open source is already part of their operation. Small open source
projects don't monetize, because it would be more work then possible gain.

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BjoernKW
If you're developing a library dual-licensing is a reasonable option.

Many open source developers probably shy away from that option though because
they're afraid that fewer companies would use their library in the first place
and they're also probably not entirely mistaken:

Enterprise companies are wary of effects licences like AGPL might have on
their ability to keep their source code private. Unfortunately, those
companies more often than not aren't exactly eager to pay for a licence that
allows them to do just that either.

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tomc1985
Because it's one of the last vestiges from this field's early influencers --
the kindly computer nerd working on stuff he enjoys

This new economy of everyone monetising everything sucks :/

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mehh
Same old nonsense answers here.

1\. Because companies don't want to pay license fees, so then don't use the
damn software, who cares.

2\. Oh you should just beg for handouts instead, because your effort and work
isn't worth crap and you should be lucky to eat the crumbs of the massive tech
industries table.

3\. Oh don't sell the software, sell a bunch of crap around it instead.

Its about time developers stopped being afraid to charge for their effort.

If you want to charge those who commercially exploit your work, than dual
license the damn thing.

------
hyperpallium
Hmmm, many bigger open source projects seem to have associated consultants
available. The project itself isn't monetized, but the guys behind it are.

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vim_user
What you're seeing may be a case of survivorship bias. Monetized licenses
aren't popular, so those licenses don't stick around.

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traviswingo
IMHO it's because, once you decide to go open source, you're creating with the
intention that this is a "for the community" type of product, not a "for
profit." It's like a non-profit company with unpaid volunteers. There's a
cause that many people believe in and anyone can help work towards that cause
to make it a reality.

~~~
AstralStorm
Moreover, many critical projects are already done by FSF or Apache Foundation,
which are non-profit. Other by RedHat, IBM, Google or Oracle, which already
monetize them.

Some were done in a "scratch an itch" fashion and author is not interested in
maintenance.

Some are research work where a given university (and not the author) would
have to draft a contract for anything monetary.

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antoniuschan99
Kickstarter, Patreon, Donations, and Company seem like the best choices. The
rest seem like it has a lot of overhead or restrictions.

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cozzyd
One barrier is that it's no fun to set up and keep going, so unless there's a
pressing need, it won't get done.

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nemild
Nadia Egbal (github) has a great list of financial strategies for open source:

[https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-
stand](https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand)

------
partycoder
In addition to donations and selling t-shirts (which is why having a proper
name and logo is key), one way of monetizing is selling support and training
related stuff. e.g: writing a book and selling it.

------
readams
Unfortunately the reality of trying to monetize open source projects is that
Red Hat will just eat your lunch if its any sort of real significant business.

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ExpiredLink
It's the competition. Free as in Free and free as in free are better than free
as in FREE TRIAL ACCOUNT.

------
ensiferum
Most open source projects don't bring in any money so why bother?

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louithethrid
Because the need for monitization is a limitation. Take a game. You can try
everything, but once you dev it for money- the whole shit-circues enters the
town- making you think about the audience, the payroll, your family - and all
these things limit you. In a very real way. Every naysayer who is applauded at
a companys meeting tells you the answer why open source sometimes is more
awesome. Because capitalism cant - and is afraid of risks.

Free as in un-bound software.

------
iamacynic
a lot of high profile open source developers/projects are sponsored by
commercial entities (redhat, intel, google, facebook, etc.), thereby
eliminating the need for direct revenue generation by the contributors and
maintainers.

------
stevefeinstein
Because not everyone is a self serving greedy objectivist dick.

Some see a benefit in contributing to a shared collective good.

~~~
techspring
I considered not replying to this just based on the tone, but here we go. If I
(theoretically) charge large corporations for SLA support, that means I can
devote more time and effort to the project which remains free to use for the
collective. The result is a higher quality product with better support at no
added cost to anyone but those that desire a higher level of support. Does
that make me (again, theoretically) a self serving greedy objectivist dick?

