from Hacker News

You Can Make Money with Open Source

by shawnjan8 on 1/15/13, 5:45 PM with 36 comments

  • by jasonkester on 1/15/13, 8:26 PM

    Indeed. That's never been in dispute. You can also make money playing violin in the subway.

    The thing is, if you want to make money, there are a lot better ways to make money than playing violin in the subway. And if you want to make money with software, there are a lot better ways to do it than to give your product away and hope that some of your users will give you charity or pay you for support.

    Wait until we see a case study come through about a company selling a SaaS product who decided to stop charging subscription fees and instead open source it and charge for support, showing how that was the key to how they made their fortune. Then maybe we can talk about this as an option worth recommending over simply selling your software for money.

  • by rburhum on 1/15/13, 6:17 PM

    I am just surprised that in 2013 we are still having this discussion.

    There are several ways "to make money with OS"; Service-based models (like support), Dual-licensing models (think Qt, MySQL, etc), Community vs "Enterprise" packaging, Extensions to popular packages, Consulting, Platform ownership, etc etc etc. Why such big surprise?!?

  • by kyle_t on 1/15/13, 6:06 PM

    I know this article is focused on the business level, but I'm finding this to be true on a personal level as well. Contributing to open source not only leads to personal improvement but it essentially creates a public portfolio of your work. This can lead to more exposure which in turn can lead to more opportunities (and better paid ones too).

    Open Source might not yield immediate benefits (i.e a paycheck) like say freelancing, but it is an investment in your future.

  • by mindcrime on 1/15/13, 8:12 PM

    Our[1] entire model is based around open source software. And I mean real open source software... developed in the open, with an open bug tracker, discussion on public mailing lists, etc.

    Now, we don't have a lot of outside contributors at the moment, but we're certainly open to them and the code, bugs, etc. are already "out there". And all (or almost all) of our stuff is (or will be) Apache License V2 licensed.

    Eventually we'll have a mix of both "productized" versions of existing projects (somewhat akin to the way Red Hat "productize" Linux) and projects that we started and wrote the bulk of the code for from scratch. Our goal is to very much follow the Red Hat model with subscriptions being a major part of our revenue stream, and then complemented by professional services, training and other add-ons.

    In the end will we "make money with Open Source"? I don't know, but we're going to try, because A. it's what we believe in, B. it's The Right Thing To Do and C. it makes the world a better place whether we succeed or fail.

    [1]: http://www.fogbeam.com

  • by rmason on 1/15/13, 6:38 PM

    This story is a bit misleading. If you study the successful companies using open source as a business model you will find they all raised large amounts of venture capital. That was during the window when open source as a business was a brand new idea.

    That window has now all but closed and it is exceedingly difficult to find examples of successful companies that bootstrapped their way to success running an open source business.

  • by paulhauggis on 1/15/13, 6:31 PM

    Can you? yes.

    But it's going to be very difficult.

    Let's say you have a really popular open source project with an enterprise version (which pays your bills). Anybody can start up a competing app with similar features and either give it out for free or charge, making it more difficult for you to make money and stay in business.

    The alternative is to have a service-based business. For one or two people, this isn't very scalable.

  • by jeffh on 1/15/13, 11:32 PM

    Disclaimer: I work at ActiveState, named in the article.

    I'd just like to point out that ActiveState is not VC funded and is profitable. We are able to grow other parts of the business from core products that are enhanced open source (much, but not all, of which is contributed back to the core open source projects). Most of this is in support and services, but we also have highly regarded tools products and a popular IDE (Komodo, of which we fully open sourced the core editor).

    Not sure why there are so many negative vibes to this article.

  • by mgk on 1/15/13, 7:59 PM

    Our main product is a desktop application built on top of the Firefox web browser. It is triple licensed GPL/LGPL/MPL. We make money by selling add-ons and a plus version, all of which is also sold under an OSS license (modified BSD). Similar to what Red Hat does, we modified the BSD to prohibit the use of our trade name (International registered wordmark) in any secondary distros of our OSS. In the end, all you have is a brand. Protecting that, protects the revenue stream.

  • by cardine on 1/15/13, 7:17 PM

    Just because you can make money with open source doesn't mean it is a good business model.

  • by Avshalom on 1/15/13, 7:21 PM

    Also note that for any thing that relies heavily on art assets, specifically games, open source is largely irrelevant.

  • by dedsm on 1/15/13, 9:01 PM

    is this a 1994 post?