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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

If you have any pointers to a company / individual making a living building open source tools for developers please let me know. (Working for a large cloud / OS provider that is subsidizing tool development as part of a platform play does not count).

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>subsidizing tool development as part of a platform play does not count

So you're excluding deploying/maintaining Open Source Software as a service. That basically excludes how Open Source is supposed to get monetized.

> So you're excluding deploying/maintaining Open Source Software as a service. That basically excludes how Open Source is supposed to get monetized.

Is it? This means that incentives would be wrong, because then developers would be incentivized to produce difficult to use (but useful!) software - with various poorly documented features, multiple ways to solve the same problems, poor and inconsistent UX... Oh wait... </s>

I am sorry Redis labs got the heat for their license change and I really hope some solution crops up. I appreciate opensource, but I am getting tired of poorly implemented systems, just because there is no incentive to do it differently.

I think the solution lies in "free-to-use (but not free-to-sell), source available" licenses. I haven't seen one that would convince me yet, but I am certain that with big-tech companies behaving like they do, more and more developers will think twice before giving away their work for free just so others can make billions off it (and take away income from the very companies providing bread and butter to FOSS developers - coughAWScough).

Not every niche is going to be covered by the benevolent interests of your local friendly cloud provider.

There are examples which other commenters have already given you, I see. What I'm curious about is why this matters; obviously we as users care about having open-source tooling (and we are in a thread discussing one such tool). Whether or not we can come up with examples of this off the cuff is completely immaterial to the constraint that proposed tools should be open-source.

The reason I asked the question was to find pointers to people to talk to about their experience making money off open source. I have been wanting to build tools in some domain and am struggling with how to monetize desktop based software tools in 2019.

Evan You (creator of VueJS) makes ~$16k a month on Patreon, plus an untold amount of fees for speaking at conferences. They also have an open collective which at the momement has a budget of just under $67k/year. It's hard to say what the money is actually used for, but at least some is used to pay for "VueJS maintenance" which probably goes towards paying Evan as well.

Thanks for this information, it helps. The issue for me is that the target audience is probably < 10k people globally. The tool would act as a serious productivity multiplier for those 10k people (and those people are very well paid). In Evans case his creation is not only awesome, it also has a large target audience.

Signal Messenger, LLC. https://signal.org/

Keybase, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keybase

KDE has full time developers.

Redis. Sidekiq.

Sidekiq charges for their Enterprise plan which starts at $179 per month, Redis offers paid Commercial Support.

The money always comes from somewhere...

Open source doesn't mean free.

Yeah, the question was about getting paid to develop open source software.

The answer is, sell support.

Wrong answer. Selling support means that the developer is incentivized to make product unnecessarily complex. Also, with recent developments it turns out that other entities might be better at providing support than original developers, taking away the option to monetize OSS. Why bother writing your own software, when you can just sell services and provide support for a different one?

Note that RedHat, often quoted as success story, is really a services company that just happens to write an occasional piece of software, and support them when their customers need it.

There's a lot more going on than just incentives to make a product "unnecessarily complex". It's certainly a concern but many companies make it work. I judge this an acceptable answer, not a wrong answer.

> It's certainly a concern but many companies make it work.

They do? Maybe. But they are walking a thin line between their short term (make it complex so we can, you know, sell support) and long term (make it simple enough that people don't jump ship) commercial interests. This is the reason I call it "unnecessarily" complex - it is in the interest of companies who sell support services that the product is not as easy to use as it could be.

Do we really need this? I think not, and I actually prefer what Redis Labs, MariaDB and others have been doing with the licenses for their modules. Sure, Business Source license and similar are not open-source (as in "freedom to take the product you have built and sell services on top of it, driving you out of similar business as collateral damage"), but at least they provide developers with the incentive to produce easy to use software, and not just because they feel like it, but because they can actually earn their living from it.

There might be some exceptions that "make it work", but this is in spite of just selling services on top of their product, not because of it. The cards are stacked against them - it is much easier (and profitable) to take other persons' product and build on it that it is to build your own.

In my experience, selling support is an acceptable answer only in the eyes of would-be competitors. Otherwise it is just plain wrong. </rant>

I don't see this as an incentive specific to FOSS. Most customers of any software tend to demand increasingly complex featuresets as time goes on.

The complexity is not specific to FOSS. The incentive as described however is.

There are many, however that's not even relevant here, considering NSA is funded via tax dollars.

JetBrains.

Vue.js

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