Flyspray: A lesson in how not to monetize open source projects

github.com

7 pointsscrollaway3 comments

As was said in the github thread, it is extremely unlikely that any meaningful revenue would ever come from adding ads to an open-source PHP project. This makes no sense at all.

Regardless of that, if the project lacks contributors, and features are not being developed, it means there is no real demand, and/or the barrier is too high (complex code etc)? The fact that the project owner himself is not willing to put down the money/effort for development is already a signal. Who is this software being written for?

To be honest, it looks like the owner wanted to make some easy passive income more than actually fund a dev. It would never fund 30k a year, let alone 60k like he's hoping to and the fact he didn't back down immediately after it was mentioned that this would get his adsense account banned screams shady.

Looks like a project that needs forking. Although that may be the death of it.

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