The amount of money you’re free to make from open source code depends on several factors.
On top of that, adoption and credibility play an essential role.
Credibility can be expressed in various ways.
How fast do you respond to new issues?
Do you frequently maintain the code?
Its unlikely that an infrequently maintained project will receive a lot of adoption.
Therefore, monetization chances will be lower.
Here are six methods you’re free to employ:
1.
Paid support
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As a project maintainer, you have a lot of knowledge about the codebase.
On the other hand, offering paid support doesnt provide a scalable business model for open source projects.
Bear in mind the time required to improve the functionality and maintain the codebase.
Developers can choose to host the software themselves.
However, this means that they have to take care of security, security, and maintenance.
Its often much easier and cheaper to pay for a managed offering under a SaaS model.
Developers pay a monthly fee to use the hosted solution.
Therefore, they can focus on the tool itself instead of all maintenance-related tasks.
Moreover, a marketing or content team often doesnt have the required technical knowledge to host a solution themselves.
For that reason, a SaaS solution is a great alternative to make money from open source software.
Paid feature requests
Its not easy for smaller projects to earn revenue.
Often, these developers have a daytime job besides maintaining an open source project.
Therefore, they are limited in time to maintain their project.
In other words, you develop new features based on a companys request.
In return, they pay you for developing the features they want.
Its one of the most straightforward models to make money from open source software.
Even a small project can find a few companies that are interested in using their open source software.
Suppose a company forks an open source project to add new functionality themselves.
This can sometimes become messy and increase maintenance complexity.
The world runs on open source.
The feature aims toreward developers for maintaining free software.
In this situation, you had to write all API calls yourself.
This situation is an ideal starting point to negotiate a deal with the company providing the product.
In other cases, companies offer bounties to developers for creating tools that support developers in using their products.
Its even possible to develop a plugin or connector that integrates a product with a different tool.
Open-Core model
Theopen-core modeloffers an interesting alternative for open-source projects to monetize their code.
Most often, you want to package modules or extensions for enterprises as proprietary code.
Therefore, developers can freely use the software in other open source projects.
However, companies have to pay for using enterprise-specific modules or integrations.
A typical example here is offering proprietary features that are required for configuring the software for production usage.
Bear in mind that its not that straightforward to offer an open-core model.
Its quite a challenge to separate proprietary features from the existing code base into packages or modules.
An open source project requires an excellent architectural setup to support the open-care model.
In conclusion, many revenue streams exist for open-source software.
This article was written byMichiel Mulders, a software engineer with a passion for the crypto space.
His interests include tech, entrepreneurship, marketing, and carefully crafted beers.
It was first published on.cult by Honeypot; find the original articlehere.
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.cult by Honeypot is a Berlin-based community platform for developers.
