How Should Open Source Development Be Subsidized? (techcrunch.com)

"Open source maintainers are exhausted and rarely paid," writes TechCrunch's editorial manager. "A new generation wants to change the economics."

An anonymous reader quotes their report: [Patreon] is increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect with fans and sustain their work... For those who hit it big, the revenues can be outsized. Evan You, who created the popular JavaScript frontend library Vue.js, has reached $15,206 in monthly earnings ($182,472 a year) from 231 patrons... While Patreon is one direct approach for generating revenues from users, another one is to offer dual licenses, one free and one commercial... Companies care about proper licensing, and that becomes the leverage to gain revenue while still maintaining the openness and spirit of open source software...

Tidelift is designed to offer assurances "around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software," CEO Donald Fischer explained... In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues... Open Collective wants to open source the monetization of open source itself. Open Collective is a non-profit platform that provides tools to "collectives" to receive money while also offering mechanisms to allow the members of those collectives to spend their money in a democratic and transparent way.
TechCrunch warns that "It's not just that people are free riding, it's often that they don't even realize it. Software engineers can easily forget just how much craftsmanship has gone into the open source code that powers the most basic of applications...

"If you work at a for-profit company, take the lead in finding a way to support the code that allows you to do your job so efficiently. The decentralization and volunteer spirit of the open source community needs exactly the same kind of decentralized spirit in every financial contributor. Sustainability is each of our jobs, every day."

Comments

Make it easy for companies to contribute. Sell it

[raymorris]

I've spent several years being paid to do open-source development full-time. The Moodle project made it easy for my organization to contribute. In fact, that's mostly what the maintainers did - maintain the community and developer documentation, not write the code.

First, the software is modular. One can write a Moodle module without touching the rest of the code, or even understanding it. The Apache web server and Linux kernel are similarly modular, and I've been paid to write modules for both.

There are example modules of various types, and how to showing how to develop for Moodle.

There is a well-maintained forum, both user forum and developer forum.

Unit tests are included and easy to run.

Utility functions are included, so you don't have to know *how* Moodle does things, the internal functions, you just call "add block" and Moodle adds your block to page.

All of the messaging welcomes participation and contributions.

All of these things encourage business, government, and non-profit organizations to contribute - meaning paying their employees to contribute.

What Moodle didn't do was offer the ability to BUY Moodle directly from the people who run the project. You CAN sell GPL software. You just can't prevent other people from selling it under a different name. The government agency I worked for probably would have purchased it if they could have. Competing proprietary software sells for thousands of dollars per year, so $500/year, or $200/year, would have been seen as super cheap. Even though we could get the same product for free, I would have encouraged them to buy a copy, and I think they would have done so.

  Moodle allows you to DONATE, but as a government agency we weren't allowed to just give away tax money. We WERE allowed to purchase software, and there was no law that we couldn't buy software if similar software is available for free.

I like prestige, and need groceries

[raymorris]

Myself, I enjoy prestige. I like that my name is in the kernel changelog.

I NEED money. I HAVE to eat, and my kid has to eat.

Prestige is nice, money is required. Given the choice between no money and lots of prestige, or the opposite, I'd take the money, so my kid can eat.

I was fortunate to be able to get paid to work on open-source for several years. I'd like to do that again, but due to changes related to globalization I don't think that's very likely to happen. Not for me at this point in my career.

Very early in my career, it occurred to me that if I wanted power, fame, and money, I should start with fame. Being very well known carries with it a degree of power - even Instagram models and other "social influencers" have the ability to influence others by being well-known. If you well-known for being very good at something, being an expert, that's more power - Stephen Hawking influenced a lot of people, and his opinions could sway others. Heck, even being really good at basketball set Dennis Rodman on a path to influencing international relations. Not deciding them, but influencing them. Once you have game and influence, it's not that hard to leverage those to get money. Especially if you're well known for being very good at something, people will pay you to do that thing - or write books about it. So fortunately you don't have to choose between prestige and money, long-term.

For people early in their careers, or stagnating, making significant contributions to open source can add some prestige to their resume, which can definitely lead to more money. Once or twice in interviews I've had the good fortune to be asked of I was familiar with certain software and been able to say I've helped write that software, I've contributed to it. Someone asked if I know LVM (a major part of the Linux storage stack), I mentioned that I'm the maintainer of the Linux::LVM Perl module. (Which needs a new maintainer, btw, and probably a rewrite to the API).