[coldpie]

> You have to fund it from selling a product.

Well, no. Most people in the world get paid for doing a thing. I pay someone $X and they do Y for me and then I have the Y that I wanted done.

This can work for software too. Someone pays me to develop software that does something useful for them, and then they have the thing they wanted. For example if Wine is missing a feature someone can pay me to implement it, and then everyone involved is happy.

I agree it's a more challenging business model, but it does work.

[Ekaros]

Money must come from somewhere. And by selling a product I mean a phone. Or box doing something. With Wine, well Valve sells games and want those games to run on something else than platform they were build for.

In the end product is being sold originally to fund that development. Software can also be pure product enabling company to do something or consumer to do something. But in that case open-source is likely incidental. Not the product.

[coldpie]

In your first comment you said, "why would I pay for [software] if it is provided for free?" And you're right, you don't. What you pay for is for someone to develop software/features that don't exist yet. Maybe the users of the phone you sell want some new feature. Then it's done and everyone's happy and even better you don't need to pay for the entire project to be built from scratch or pay ongoing license fees or whatever. That's how you monetize open source.

[sallveburrpi]

What are some examples of big OSS projects that work with this model? Aka “pay us to get feature X?”

It sounds to me that this would invite an insane level of bloat and one-off features.

[coldpie]

Igalia, Collabora, Red Hat, GCC, LLVM, Wine, the entire Linux kernel. Tons of open source consulting companies out there working on all kinds of projects.

[sallveburrpi]

I don’t think I can pay Linus to implement a specific feature for me. But maybe I just misunderstood and you were talking about consulting only?

[coldpie]

The vast majority of Linux kernel development is corporations paying devs to implement the features they need. Some of that is in-house developers, some of that is hiring contractors like Igalia or Collabora or many others. That's what I'm talking about.