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Has anyone actually succeeded by building an opensource project? And How?

6 points by ledzep2 ↗ HN
I've seen a lot of great open source projects. But most of them are from successful companies like Google/Facebook/Twitter/Dotcloud. And I've heard a lot about the open source business model, like doing commercial consultation and projects as the primary source of income. But I just don't know anyone who really made a fortune out of it. Am I seeing it in a wrong way or it's just not possible for open source authors to get rich?

5 comments

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nostrademons
It's possible for open-source authors to get rich (Linus Torvalds made several million from VA Linux's IPO), but much like academics, the financial returns are usually an order of magnitude or so less than comparable levels of success in the business world. It makes sense that someone trying to get paid for their labor would make more money than someone who gives their labor away for free.
xahrepap
The interesting thing to me are the projects that try and make money after becoming popular. And they're popular because they started as oss.

Think Jenkins. It took off because it was foss. Now the creators are trying to create a way to make money off of it by selling Jenkins-aaS.

They gave away their labor, got popular because they gave it away. Now they're building a business around the free parts. If they had never given it away to begin with, would there have ever been a CloudBees?

ingler
Matt Mullenweg did alright. Whoever wrote Bitcoin probably did ok too.
ledzep2
Did Matt become rich before or after he started wordpress.com? Does OSS always have to end up as an sass to make profit?

Bitcoin should be another topic coz it created a whole realm, one of a kind.

kls
Does OSS always have to end up as an sass to make profit?

Not always there are some technical oriented products where the originators set up shop as a consultancy and offer expertise in the technology. The Dojo Toolkit is a good example of such an arrangement. Where you can hire Site-Pen to develop web applications with the technology the founders created. It is probably a less lucrative model but it is another way that revenue is generated around the OSS model.

As for the OP's question about success, I am pretty sure the founders of Pentaho are doing pretty well. Maybe not Google well, but I would assume that they are fairly wealthy individuals now. Granted they have played down their OSS roots on their site, but they still do offer the community edition.