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> Super! So we should Open Source Hiri tomorrow. And I would love to. But there is a serious problem with this argument. If we do Open Source Hiri, there is nothing to stop someone from forking it and selling it for less /offering it for free. We die. Sorry, but it seems you don't know the landscape at all if this is truly your honest opinion. Open source companies making a profit and not being forked to death is not a new thing. I can name almost every profit-making OSS project/organization ever to counter this. <project x> is open source, why are they still going strong, making money? Why has their project not been forked and sold for less? It's not that simple in practice. As projects grow in size they require paid manpower to be competitive in terms of features, security, bugs fixed, etc, and implementation speed. While in theory projects can be, and in practice are forked all the time, they are rarely forked and undersold in the manner you fear, and if attempted, they will quickly lag behind your project if they don't have the necessary man hours and expertise. Most forks are hobby/personal, some form a small community, rarely do we see what you seem to think is a huge risk. Another factor is the brand, the name and reputation you have built, customer relations, support deals, you can't just fork these things. Microsoft could open source the entirety of their software today without financial risk. |
I'm very much interested to know about these profit-making OSS projects.
How many of them are profitable enough that they are able to pay their developers $80K/year, which is the median salary for software developers in the US?
From what I can tell, the majority of them are "profitable" in the sense that someone else pays for developer costs. For example, when Guido van Rossum was at Google, Google paid for him to work 50% on Python development. The other core developers seems to be in similar situations. How many of them are paid by the Python Software Foundation?
The Django Software Foundation is profitable. It doesn't pay for any developers.
The Sage project didn't get a full time developer until 2016, and then only because of an EU grant.
Project Jupyter funds their developers. Their Form 990 schedule O for 2016 says they had $665,619 in contract labor. They could do this because they had $2M in grants.
These are for widely used projects.
Then there are the profitable OSS organizations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which has operational control over Kubernetes. It charges high membership fees. I think it's best to interpret this as a way for Google, Amazon, and others to reduce their costs and prevent competition by commoditizing hosting. (See https://changelog.com/podcast/300 ).
MySQL made money from shaking the big scary GPL at people who didn't want to pay for Oracle. Some of the companies who dual-license under the AGPL use a similar tactic.
So, which profit-making OSS projects are you thinking of?
How many of them have the ability to pay 3 full-time developers (that seems to be the number of people at Hiri)?
How big was their developer/user community before it was able to pay for 3 developers?
I can research the last two questions - I just want names.
But if you don't know the answers, then perhaps your views of how projects with 100K+ users work might not scale down to projects with only 5K users. Yet 5K users willing to pay $100/year is enough to fund three developers full-time.
See also https://caddy.community/t/the-realities-of-being-a-foss-main... , which talks about some of the 'bad' and 'ugly' realities of being a F/OSS maintainer. And yes, I face some of those problem (like entitlement) in running my F/OSS project.
Note that that link is an example where the F/OSS project development was not sustainable as-is.