State of OSS Monetization
Hi OSS Developers,
I hope that you can help me understand the state of OSS Monetization better. I’m interested if and how you monetize - or try to monetize - your projects.
To get a better picture of the current state of OSS monetization I’ve set-up a quick survey to evaluate different monetization approaches and what OSS developers would require to work full- or part-time on their OSS projects.
The survey with 16 questions will take about 5 minutes and is aimed at OSS developers / maintainers: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegX_yKiGtXamKrVfg_1ioVWZ3Xdvtc3usZYn7p20dysHiaGQ/viewform
Best regards, Joerg
PS: if you want to get the Survey Results you can join an email list at: https://mailchi.mp/8e59bb1c13db/state-of-oss-monetization
41 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 99.2 ms ] threadThis is extremely poorly phrased. Are you talking about Microsoft/ Amazon/ Google/ Facebook? Your local pizza shop? A percentage of all corporate revenue? Is this "should" as in "would ideally", or should as in "we should shame them if they don't"? I don't think this question is going to get a meaningful answer.
For me it is split. I develop open source licensed software at work and my employer tries to make revenue. Privately I do stuff for fun and don't want the responsibilities of having "customers." If people use it for free and make money, so be it, but I have the liberty to stop/pause working on it.
That can happen, but sometimes monetization isn't the answer. Getting more contributors is. As the song goes, "Can't buy me love..."
This could be changed essentially overnight, if Big Tech wasn't against it. For example, it is trivial to add payment to something like GitHub. There could be PRs that are behind a paywall and someone would have to pay for the contribution so that it can be merged; and ban 0$ dollar PRs.
The fact that someone can come into my open repository and tell me something completely orthogonal to it is an "issue" makes me vomit (and this basically reveals the whole sham of GitHub). Posting an issue should probably be behind a paywall too now that I think of it; but you deposit it to the maintainer / repo owner / assignee.
"slave labor" would imply a lack of freedom on behalf of the slave laborer.
I think there's something quite remarkable going on that is quite the contrary of what you say: People who work as software engineers in their day jobs are so starved of freedom, that they spend evenings and weekends doing more software engineering, i.e. more of what they're doing in their day jobs. Only now, they are actually happy doing it, because they're free. This freedom comes at a price, and this price is that they have to give away their work for free.
If paid software engineering jobs did a better job at fulfilling people's psychological needs on creative freedom, the drive for mastery, the desire to make a name for oneself through one's work, etc. there probably wouldn't be any open source, because the psychological needs that motivate it would be otherwise met.
If software engineering was better organized as a profession (like the way "labour" is organized when doing collective bargaining, or the way certain professions are organized like the legal profession) then maybe paid software engineering jobs would be better.
But we are totally disorganized as a profession and each individual seems to be perfectly ready to undercut others at every turn, e.g. being more accepting of bad working conditions, like lack of creative freedom, than the next guy. Studying harder for ridiculous leetcode interviews than the next guy. Putting in more hours than the next guy on hiring projects. Being more accepting than the next guy when employers refuse to give employees time for training on new technologies and instead doing it on weekends. When the work is actually enjoyable, being willing to do it for less money than the next guy. The equilibrium of that last dynamic is where the price is zero, and that's what open source is. A corollary of that is: Since all the enjoyable work gets done for free, there is no enjoyment left in any of the work that one can hope to get paid for. -- We have to stop doing this to each other. We have to stop the race to the bottom.
Open source, and not getting paid for it, is not the problem. It's the imperfect solution to a problem that, in a more perfect world, wouldn't exist in the first place.
And I'm approaching 40 myself and have been a part of this industry since the late 90s, so I'm not speaking out of youthful naiveté either, but rather from the vantage point of a conscious set of choices I've made on personal values and introspection into my own psychological needs.
The set of people who share such values/needs may or may not be a majority, but I never claimed they were. This discussion was originally on the broken state of open source, and my contention is that a lot of people who do open source probably do it because they're a little bit like me, frustrated with their day jobs, and looking for a way to contribute to the world in line with personal values that are similar to mine, and an outlet for unmet psychological needs similar to mine.
It's surprising you haven't encountered different programming cultures in the world. The bay area has a distinct culture than eastern Europe which is different than China or India. And this co-relates to varying attitudes on open source and other down-stream effects. Naturally these also differ from industry to industry.
And what makes you assume I haven't encountered different [programming] cultures around the world? ...because I have.
Making issues private (behind a paywall) is probable the new approach of Github with their "sponsors-only repositories". However this will probably cause more closed-source where the community cannot contribute bugs or feature requests.
It's slave exploitation as evidenced by the lack of payment for labor which, from the perspective of the open source developer, was motivated by the complete deprivation of opportunities for paid labor.
Many people make their project open source because they know that their project would have 0 chance of getting any adoption unless they gave it away for free. The masters created market conditions which deprived the slaves of any opportunity for fair remuneration (made possible by the design of the modern monetary system).
So why attach a working idea to a Proof-of-Waste scheme? What would be the added value?
Nobody cares about features or quality anymore, it's all about financial schemes; you need to create financial incentives for adoption of the product. The product is secondary, the financial scheme is primary. How do you think SaaS companies manage to convince big corporations to pay to use their services? Kickbacks to corporate employees!!! It's all corrupt. The good thing about crypto is that it's more hidden and it allow the provider to keep their hands clean. The employees of the corporations can buy the token themselves to profit from their own corruption so it's not direct like a kickback and only the employee of the corporation is to blame, not the SaaS provider.
It allows the provider to participate in the corrupt modern economic system whilst not actively bribing people. It allows corporate insiders to bribe themselves without implicating the provider. This effect is already commonplace among big corporations; politicians buy corporate stocks and then pass laws to benefit the companies whose stocks they bought... Crypto just levels the playing field by allowing small players to also participate in this scheme.
So, no thanks.
I agree, but I'm very confused about the original proposal because I think fiat is not good enough for bribes.
On the other hand, if a financial instrument exists which is coupled to a specific economic service, then no solicitation or offering step is necessary in order to align incentives between a provider and a supplier.
Also, note that this is not insider trading. Insider trading means that a trade was made after an event occurred but before that event was made public. In this case, the trade is made first, before the event occurred.
It's hypocritical to suggest that this is dirty or unethical when the entire economy including all popular open source projects depend on these same kinds of financial incentives to exist.
The modern monetary system is corrupt to the core and yet it drives every single human interaction and every single collaboration. Let's not pretend it doesn't.
So the blockchain approach has a mechanism already in place that will support the payment.
Making money is a bad thing to do.
Don't do it if possible.
Money merely represents value. If we fairly created value for others, it is fair to be able to get money representing that value in return.
Making money ethically is something that should be encouraged - it means creating more value for other people.
If you want to make money from your software, make it closed source and SELL IT.
The whole point of OSS is: You have an itch -> scratch it -> release it -> others maybe use it, maybe don't, they add on to it, release changes back -> now 2 people are working on it instead of one and both benefit.
That's the point. It's not about trying to trap companies into giving you money because you released something for free. Either sell software or don't. No one owes open source devs anything beyond what the license states.
Roughly speaking: focus on producing something of value, and then the monetization strategy should follow naturally if the project succeeds.
At the same time, I think it's important to focus on reducing total cost of infrastructure, because doing that increases the size of the audience who can participate and reach a sustainable value threshold.
(and one caveat to that: long-term cost is often minimized thanks to high-quality, durable systems that often have high associated price points. it may be necessary to have entry-level alternatives available too, although I don't think that's an excuse for providing poor-quality systems, or for entrenching high price points on legacy trusted systems)