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Yes you do. You sell the "volunteering" program itself for a cost.

> The BlueWave Labs program is an incredible value at only $259 per month to cover the cost of training and mentorship.

You run a company that takes volunteer work and turns it into B2B software, which supposedly isn't even all open source ("For the closed source products, BlueWave Labs owns the code produced."), basically exchanging free labor for a letter of recommendation (but only after 6 months indentured servitude, according to the FAQ). And you charge volunteers money to do it on top of that!

So the volunteers pay the "mentors'" (i.e., company owners) salary and contribute code to your codebase for free on top of that. Amazing grift you got going on! You can pull a MongoDB at any time as soon as your products become mature enough to be worth real money to companies.

I'm not a fan of this "volunteer-built corporate software" structure. Anyone who knows how to code at all has enough skills to justify a paid internship. Service/support contracts/hosted SaaS with an open source product should be able to support paying your developers.




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