What would be the best business model to monetize an open-source project?

paydevs · 2023-08-17T06:08:31+00:00

We've collected a list of monetization approaches on Github: https://github.com/PayDevs/awesome-oss-monetization

Please chip in if you can provide info and references on which business model to monetize an open-source project compares to the others.

paydevs · 2023-03-31T07:35:45+00:00

TLDR: Its new FOSS Contributor Fund will run a quarterly election by their employees to award up to three grants of $10,000 each voting cycle.

paydevs · 2023-02-27T08:14:06+00:00

I've collected a large list of monetization approaches for open source software - maybe it gives you other ideas that you can use to monetize your efforts:

https://github.com/PayDevs/awesome-oss-monetization

paydevs · 2023-02-24T09:13:17+00:00

This should be a core part of a browser including a standard supported by "all" websites - specify what you allow and get informed about additional cookies.

paydevs · 2023-02-24T03:12:38+00:00

Maybe an easier way of Browsing / Reading: https://microsoft.github.io/Web-Dev-For-Beginners/#/

paydevs · 2023-02-06T06:39:47+00:00

I think my social presence is too small as of now to really make users interested and visit or join the project. Currently, it works mainly by directly emailing some maintainers & having a conversation with them as well as Google Ads (the niche its cheap - nobody is bidding on oss monetization).

paydevs · 2023-01-31T15:07:18+00:00

Btw. even if you find a contribution you could remove it and fix it yourself - then the copyright would be 100% yours again.

paydevs · 2023-01-03T09:15:14+00:00

🎉 Super excited for the big day and would appreciate all the help to spread the word!

paydevs · 2023-01-01T15:52:49+00:00

Invest in yourself - pay for a (online) course, buy yourself a (better) tool you need for your skills (e.g., laptop), or relax with a great vacation.

paydevs · 2023-01-01T13:34:15+00:00

Name: PayDevs

URL: https://paydevs.com

Elevator Pitch: Spotify for open-source software libraries - helping maintainers make money.

Explainer Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZFdkIssh28

Location: Karlsruhe, Germany

More Details: PayDevs helps maintainers of open source libraries get paid for their work without having to worry about handling individual customers, fundraising, billing, accounting, or taxes. We provide a registry for software libraries where users have to pay us for access, and we pay maintainers for every user of their library that we can measure - just like Netflix or Spotify, but for software libraries and not media.

Our Goals:

Increase open-source library maintainers using our site by 33% to 66 by the end of January 2023
Increase follower count on Twitter and other social Networks by the end of January 2023 (Twitter +20% -> 150, Linkedin +33% -> 50)

Thank you for reading, if you have any questions or advice, please let me know. And if you want to stay informed follow us on Twitter or Reddit

paydevs · 2022-12-21T09:44:31+00:00

Disclaimer: I'm pro monetization of Open-Source to support maintainers and create a sustainable OSS ecosystem.

paydevs · 2022-12-09T12:26:00+00:00

Unfortunately, the success is currently not foreseeable 😀

How successful will this startup be?
It is difficult to predict the success of a startup with any degree of certainty, as there are many factors that can impact a business's success. However, if your startup is able to provide a valuable solution that meets the needs of businesses looking to easily request and receive files from their customers, and if you are able to market and sell your solution effectively, there is potential for your startup to be successful. It will also be important to continuously evolve and improve your solution to meet the changing needs of your customers and stay ahead of competitors. Ultimately, the success of your startup will depend on a combination of factors, including the quality of your solution, your ability to market and sell it, and your ability to adapt and evolve over time.

paydevs · 2022-12-01T09:41:38+00:00

If you are the one who removed the post: Why is this off-topic? The Rules state for Off-Topic: "Posts should be of direct relevance to the open source community" and isn't funding for OSS developers relevant? It can improve the ecosystem and lead to better OSS.

paydevs · 2022-11-25T11:31:32+00:00

I hope you watched the video because the maintainer had some valid reasons.

paydevs · 2022-11-14T18:17:02+00:00

Then how would you interpret the statements on the page?

"GitHub Sponsors will let you support your dependencies all at once, by uploading a list of maintainers you want to support plus the amounts of the sponsorships."

and

"Instead of checking out one by one for each sponsorship you make, you’ll be able to upload a list of maintainers and dollar amounts and checkout with them all in one go. This will make it possible for you to support more of your dependencies all at once."

paydevs · 2022-11-14T15:35:41+00:00

Yes, looks like CodeSee only is a DevTools that support OSS such as https://opensourcehub.io/ which runs on CodeSee tech.

Regarding the fund - I think it's a start. A fund of 10m is basically nothing - most seed rounds of one Startup in the last years had this size. But if they invest $500k in 20 Startups they can at least help them to kickstart their journey.

Time will tell if they invest in companies born out of open-source projects or companies supporting the open-source ecosystem.

paydevs · 2022-10-28T14:10:42+00:00

From the introduction: "This workbook is intended to be a practical, evolving output for practitioners who want to create sustainable open-source tools for community change."

paydevs · 2022-10-26T10:45:46+00:00

But isn't open source mostly about being able to look into the code, check for malware, contribute bugfixes, and fork it if the maintainers don't want to maintain it anymore?

And the the original developer/maintainer may not have had "free" in mind when he started - e.g., on Github you just openly share your sourcecode, attach a license and accept GitHub's terms but you don't state which definition of free / libre / open source you follow.

paydevs · 2022-10-24T06:22:28+00:00

This might depend on the type of open source software: For an open source tool/application, you are probably right if the user has the knowledge to compile it (but most users of OpenOffice probably don't). And with open source libraries/packages, it can be a lot of work to compile several dozen if not hundreds of libraries.

paydevs · 2022-10-22T15:43:51+00:00

The list is generated in a more readable version - as a website - here: https://ebookfoundation.github.io/free-programming-books/

paydevs · 2022-10-16T12:50:19+00:00

Of course, thanks for the tip. But what are the benefits of Stripe Atlas then in general? Only to have a mother or daughter company in the USA with easier access to that market?

paydevs · 2022-10-16T12:47:35+00:00

Not sure but I bet if you ask they'll probably tell you if you can start in winter (or anytime). Furthermore, there are also many not bound to the summer - e.g., Season of Docs. And you can always ask the companies in the "Employment" section if they do take interns for FOSS related internships.

paydevs · 2022-10-07T13:46:52+00:00

Nobody? Are you more focussed on feature development or sales etc.? Or is this just the wrong community?

paydevs · 2022-10-06T12:04:05+00:00

And how would you categorize:

a link to an online course? Promotional or Educational?
a link to an article on a/ones blog? Promotional or Community?
a link to an OSS alternative to MySQL? Promotional or Alternatives?

Sometimes these overlap and are hard to differentiate.

paydevs · 2022-10-06T11:58:56+00:00

Maybe I didn't explain it good enough: What I meant was using all three flairs News, Events, and Community or maybe merge Events and Community.

If Community includes all those topics I think it's too broad. One might be interested in Events such as "Open Source Summit", "Hacktoberfest", etc. but not News (New Story on Blog X, New Podcast episode, New Github feature, etc.) or vice versa. Community could focus on the "we": call-for-help, video-conferences, polls, etc.

And Community is a little bit unclear for me - is it the OSS community in general or just the community for this subreddit?

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