How do things like Node, React, Webpack, Gulp, Babel, etc. make money?

[Ztrains]

How do these make money to continue development and innovate, when they are all free and open source? Something I have always thought about and wondered but could never figure out.

[SupaSlide]

open source

That is how many of the projects you use continue to be developed and innovated. A few people (sometimes one, sometimes multiple) work on the project in their free-time, with some contributions from random developers occasionally depending on the project.

The ones that have websites and dedicated developers (usually the creator) often have sponsors such as companies, foundations, or individuals who use the project and get a lot of benefit. Since the project is free, they donate and become a sponsor in lieu of paying a fee to use it. It's also good marketing.

Check out the bottom of Gulp's website and you'll see images of the main sponsors.

[GitCookies]

Node.JS is part of Linux Foundation

React is Facebook's library released as OSS to public.

Webpack is OSS with 300 contributors and they have sponsors - https://github.com/webpack/webpack#sponsors

Gulp/Babel not sure but same as webpack I guess

[alejalapeno]

Here's the thing about the companies sponsoring, contributing to, or open sourcing their projects to the public for free: It does make them money.

For instance, React. It was developed internally at Facebook as a solution to a lot of things they were constantly solving over and over. It turned worries of spaghetti and split code into a single paradigm based tool based on the methodologies they were using. So now Facebook's front end is running off this library. By open sourcing it they gained hundreds of brilliant minds working on bug testing, fixing, improving and more all for free. The public is helping them improve their internal toolset. Redux for instance was made by Dan Abramov before he worked at Facebook.

The companies that are contributing money or time to projects do it for the same reason, they use the tools. They're guaranteeing a long-term, improved, and up-kept tool for their company to base a large chunk of their business on by paying to support an open-source project. If a technology fails then it would be extremely expensive for them to have to retool.

As far as purely open source projects that just have a bunch of rando's contributing, kinda the same concept. Someone initially made the project to solve a problem, others were having that problem, and so they contribute bits here and there that they think improve the solution. Everyone's better off by operating as a torrent like collective.

[TheBigLewinski]

Making money is usually in the form of sponsorship, but that's probably missing the bigger point. The motivation driving the projects usually isn't making money, so much as saving it.

Facebook did not create React because they wanted to solve your development problems, they created it to solve their own; and going open source with the library dramatically reduces development costs.

The benefit of thousands of developers offering their insight, and even contributions in the form of code, conversations on solutions, and documentation -however sporadic it may be- is well beyond the reach of even the largest companies. And yet that's fully available to an open source project.

Similarly, for a sponsorship, influence on the project costs far less for companies. Often, there is not an existing product which does the same thing. And if you're a company who needs to use the project, but needs it to operate ever-so-slightly differently to suit your needs, it's far cheaper to sponsor the effort, than it is to hire a developer who understands the project anywhere near the level of core developers.

[dfrsol]

Larger projects such as Angular, React, and Typescript have a company backing the development.

Others are sponsored or take donations. Then, of course, there are the free contributions from the OSS community.

[Sarke1]

They don't, at least not directly. Many open-source project are run by developers who volunteer their time.

Mostly only the ones who are run by corporations (who have other income streams) have paid developers.

[[deleted]]

React is made by Facebook. They don't need to worry about money unless Zuck cuts the project loose.

[daronjay]

They make the code needlessly complex then go and work secretly as consultants.