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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

While I'm always excited about new ways of monetizing open source, if I'm looking at the OpenCollective contribution page for Fody correctly, this model has made them under $10,000 in the past 2 years or so.

From a business perspective that's basically a rounding error and nothing compared to what you can do with the conventional approach of selling consulting/support or, heaven forbid, your own proprietary solution.

So in what sense is this the best model? Has anyone used it to generate $100,000 in annual revenue, let alone say $10M+? More profitable model = more hiring developers to improve the software...!

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It is indeed terrible from a business perspective, because Fody isn't a business. It's an open-source project. If you want to start a business, you should start a business. The author of TFA wasn't under any illusions it would completely replace her day job, the problem was that it wasn't worth spending the time on after the day job. There's no substitute for selling retail copies / subscriptions, but within the realm of open source for all, Fody's model is the most efficient way of converting appreciation into a little extra cash.

This is a deceptively insightful comment. At least it wasn't clear to me for a while.

If you want to start a business it can definitely have an open-source element to it, but that's just it. The open-source part is just one piece to a business and you better be aware of all the other pieces that need to be done in order to make money which aren't always engineering/programming related. EG: marketing, sales, consulting, fundraising, accounting, etc...

A common approach that people do now is create the open source offering then run it as a service where they can charge a premium for the support and leg work for hosting it. See: mongodb or elasticsearch or influxdb.

I haven't found many pure open source solutions where all they do is make the software better all day and ignore all the elements of business growth needed. Maybe the Linux foundation is a good counter example but I don't think there is a clear path to be paid for just contributing solely to open-source while neglecting other business elements.

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