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Ask HN: What to do if your open source project becomes famous?

7 points by __kmem__ ↗ HN
If your open source project becomes famous could you earn a living out of it? Do you know any examples of a project that became famous or most used and is hiring a team of devs to work on it.

8 comments

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ggchappell
> If your open source project becomes famous could you earn a living out of it?

Yes, it is possible. It is perhaps a bit unlikely, though.

You would need some way to get money out of a product that is being given away. Selling advertising is one model. Charging for support is another.

> Do you know any examples of a project that became famous or most used and is hiring a team of devs to work on it.

Certainly. You probably know about them, too: Firefox, Red Hat, Ubuntu, ....

__kmem__
How do you sell ads on open source code ? I know about ubuntu and firefox but was wondering if there are startups doing open source work and generating revenue. I know about core os but have no clue on how they generate revenue.
ggchappell
> How do you sell ads on open source code?

The code just shows ads. Users are free to get rid of them, but you hope they don't; perhaps you encourage them not to. (Note: webpages are often the same way; users can run AdBlock if they want.) If advertisers pay only for click-throughs to their site, then they know they're not getting ripped off.

> I know about ubuntu and firefox but was wondering if there are startups doing open source work and generating revenue.

Well, you said "famous". Once you're famous, you're often not a start-up any more. In any case, I can't think of any, but then I'm not really into the start-up scene.

anarazel
Paid feature development can also work well for some types of projects. You have to be careful to not do that for too basic stuff though, otherwise you'll be seen as profiteering. It also just hinders adoption.
pjungwir
The sidekiq ruby gem (https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq) is a good example of a small open source project that earns a living for its author, Mike Perham. He sells licenses to a closed-source version with some enhanced features. I'm sure he also gets consulting work from being the author. This seems like a more "approachable" example than e.g. PostgreSQL.
mperham
Yep, Sidekiq is my full-time job. I choose to sell a closed-source product rather than support. Selling support means I would be incentivized to provide poor documentation and/or make it complex/hard to setup/manage. Instead a recent customer called my wiki documentation "the best and most extensive" he'd ever seen.
BorisMelnik
sweet, either way you are setting yourself up for some sweet consulting in the future.
liquidcool
What's interesting is that you don't even have to be the creator of said project to profit off it. There are companies that provide commercial support and consulting for Tomcat and Postgresql, but they didn't create them. There are a ton of other examples in enterprise grade FOSS.