HACKER Q&A
📣 asim

Did anyone figure out how to make money from open source?


Hey. I'm the author of Go Micro. An open source framework for Go development. Over the past 10 years I never managed to find a sustainable way to keep working on this. I bootstrapped with my own savings. Meaning I quit my job and burned what was in a bank account for 9-10 months (most people don't have this luxury). I then managed to find a corporate sponsor (again a friend doing me a favour which most people don't have the luxury of). And after about 4 years of doing that I raised VC funding to try build a product around the framework and turn it into a real company. That went very poorly. So I think open source sustainability is hard and from first hand experience I never managed to make it work. I'm curious to know if anyone figured it out? We know elastic, hashicorp, redis, etc. But did anyone make it work in a smaller capacity? I even remember the story of Mike Perham with Sidekiq and doing like $1m in sales solo. But again I never managed to make any of it work myself.


  👤 JohnFen Accepted Answer ✓
Wordpress and Nextcloud come to mind. Arguably Red Hat as well. A web search turns up more companies that worked out how to do this, although I've not heard of most of them, so I don't know.

In my own ventures, I don't try. My commercial software is sold under a proprietary license, not open source, although I do provide the source code with the license. My open source offerings are not intended to make money.