The Biggest Lie In Open Source
It Can’t Be a Source of Income

Open source software is free. Therefore, its maintainers and creators can’t make a living out of it.

Wrong.

At first glance, open source software is free for its users. But there is a lot more to understand before saying it can’t be a valid source of income.

Like with any digital product, making money is all about your business model and the marketing strategy behind it. If you’re interested in making money from open source projects, here are some ideas for you to consider.

Selling professional services

This is the most common one. As I’ve said before, people tend to assume that because you’ve built a project and published it to the world, you need to support it 24 hours a day. That’s not only untrue, but it’s definitely a whole different area of work. So why not charge for it?

In fact, why not charge for training as well and even provide support for companies trying to use your free product? Those are what we call professional services (services meant for companies using your product).

There are big examples of open source projects doing this exact thing. For example, RedHat, IBM, Hortonworks (around Apache Hadoop), and Percona (for their open-source database).

Selling related content

How many books have you seen (or even read) about React or PHP? The books weren’t free, were they?

If you managed to build an open source project that people like and use, then you can make money by giving those people products they can use to learn how to use it. This is very similar to the professional services model, yet that one implies you’re personally involved (thus allowing you to charge higher rates). However, with products, you can build cheap alternatives that are accessible to non-company users (i.e. developers trying to use your code).

Even if you’re not the project’s author, you can benefit from their success by doing this exact same thing. You’re building products around an open source project (just not your own).

We’re talking about writing books about it, creating video courses for platforms such as Udemy, or even writing sponsored blog posts about these OS projects. Why not? Sometimes, authors will be willing to pay you money to write about their projects.

Donations

You can make money from people donating to your cause. Don’t be afraid to ask for money. As long as it’s done tastefully, it’s definitely a valid income option.

And if you’ve built a project that a big community is using, you’ll be surprised at the results. Looking at projects such as Git, you’ll see that they do receive donations from anyone interested in their cause.

It’s all about the reach your project has and the community built behind it. If it’s big enough, then there is probably a way to make money out of it.

There are many other ways you can go about building income from your open source work. It’s just a matter of getting creative.
['Fernando Doglio']
['Open Source', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming']