

Ask HN: What to do if your open source project becomes famous? - __kmem__

If your open source project becomes famous could you earn a living out of it? Do you know any examples of a project that became famous or most used and is hiring a team of devs to work on it.
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pjungwir
The sidekiq ruby gem
([https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq](https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq)) is
a good example of a small open source project that earns a living for its
author, Mike Perham. He sells licenses to a closed-source version with some
enhanced features. I'm sure he also gets consulting work from being the
author. This seems like a more "approachable" example than e.g. PostgreSQL.

~~~
mperham
Yep, Sidekiq is my full-time job. I choose to sell a closed-source product
rather than support. Selling support means I would be incentivized to provide
poor documentation and/or make it complex/hard to setup/manage. Instead a
recent customer called my wiki documentation "the best and most extensive"
he'd ever seen.

~~~
BorisMelnik
sweet, either way you are setting yourself up for some sweet consulting in the
future.

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ggchappell
> If your open source project becomes famous could you earn a living out of
> it?

Yes, it is _possible_. It is perhaps a bit unlikely, though.

You would need some way to get money out of a product that is being given
away. Selling advertising is one model. Charging for support is another.

> Do you know any examples of a project that became famous or most used and is
> hiring a team of devs to work on it.

Certainly. You probably know about them, too: Firefox, Red Hat, Ubuntu, ....

~~~
__kmem__
How do you sell ads on open source code ? I know about ubuntu and firefox but
was wondering if there are startups doing open source work and generating
revenue. I know about core os but have no clue on how they generate revenue.

~~~
anarazel
Paid feature development can also work well for some types of projects. You
have to be careful to _not_ do that for too basic stuff though, otherwise
you'll be seen as profiteering. It also just hinders adoption.

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liquidcool
What's interesting is that you don't even have to be the creator of said
project to profit off it. There are companies that provide commercial support
and consulting for Tomcat and Postgresql, but they didn't create them. There
are a ton of other examples in enterprise grade FOSS.

