'Open Source Creators: Red Hat Got $34 Billion and You Got $0. Here's Why.' (tidelift.com)

Donald Fischer, who served as a product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux during its creation and early years of growth, writes: Red Hat saw, earlier than most, that the ascendance of open source made the need to pay for code go away, but the need for support and maintenance grew larger than ever. Thus Red Hat was never in the business of selling software, rather it was in the business of addressing the practical challenges that have always come along for the ride with software. [...] As an open source developer, you created that software. You can keep your package secure, legally documented, and maintained; who could possibly do it better? So why does Red Hat make the fat profits, and not you? Unfortunately, doing business with large companies requires a lot of bureaucratic toil. That's doubly true for organizations that require security, legal, and operational standards for every product they bring in the door. Working with these organizations requires a sales and marketing team, a customer support organization, a finance back-office, and lots of other "business stuff" in addition to technology. Red Hat has had that stuff, but you haven't.

And just like you don't have time to sell to large companies, they don't have time to buy from you alongside a thousand other open source creators, one at a time. Sure, big companies know how to install and use your software. (And good news! They already do.) But they can't afford to put each of 1100 npm packages through a procurement process that costs $20k per iteration. Red Hat solved this problem for one corner of open source by collecting 2,000+ open source projects together, adding assurances on top, and selling it as one subscription product. That worked for them, to the tune of billions. But did you get paid for your contributions?

Comments

Re:News?

[guruevi]

Millenials do expect compensation for nothing. These are the same people that say "I can't generate income from my degree in lesbian dance theory, I need my parents to get me free health care and we need UBI".

You get what you put in it. If you contribute to open source, you do it because it fixes your problems you have right now and you believe that sharing it will benefit you in some way (others will share with you, you get some recognition etc). You are free to start up an open source company and take the million dollar risk that it will fail. You are also free to simply do a day job for a company and guarantee that you get paid. That's the difference between entrepreneurs and employees - one is sure to get paid at the end of the day, the other one not.