nayafia / lemonade-stand Goto Github PK

by putting it under consulting...

Feel free to email me if you need more info.

See also what I wrote about this 8 years ago: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2636165

I described it in a blogpost here some time ago;

https://read.cash/@TomZ/how-to-ensure-income-for-crypto-currency-infrastructure-development-b016814f

Relevant excerpt;

Developing money infrastructure is about money
In many ways joining Bitcoin Cash is like joining a startup. They often don't follow 9-5 office hours or get a (big) monthly paycheck. Instead the pay is in stock or options and the harder you work to increase the value, the more valuable your stock will be.
There are a lot of parallels between bitcoincash with startups in that most of the active Bitcoin Cash developers joined without anyone hiring them. It is well known that most of them indeed have savings in Bitcoin Cash and today are working on BCH to make their investment rise in value.
Developers that add utility to Bitcoin Cash literally create value. And the network effect of money means that this comes right back to them in the shape of their holdings rising in value.

That last sentence is likely the simplest and shortest version. Replace "Bitcoin Cash" in there with a more generic term for money and it still works.

This repo is something I really needed one year ago when I was conceptualising the business model behind my side project ReadonlyREST, which soon became my day job.

I tried to put together a similar research, but this is much better and more complete. So big thank you for publishing it!

The only thing that doesn't sound ok is the name of the repo, OSS is not just "lemonade stand" material. Like the doc shows and demonstrates via the case studies cited, OSS is a very solid business strategy in so many ways.

What do you think?

As noted on the here Andrew's campaign wasn't an official crowdfunding effort by the Django project, which is an important distinction to for example's Django's own only partially successful efforts to raise funds for the Django Software Foundation -- and indirectly to pay for the Django Fellowship Program (et al).

As a fellow Django core developer who was not successful at making a living while working on Django full or even half time (despite having served as core dev, DSF director, OPs team member, translation manager, conference chair and speaker etc) I'd like to humbly point out that Andrew's success should not be advertised as the default for working on Django or in its community. There are many cautionary tales obviously and I know I'm biased, but I do feel a responsibility to prevent creating wrong expectations about the financial viability of direct work on Django.

I understand the intent of this repo, and I appreciate your efforts tremendously, the Open/Public Source community has a problem of funding, just wanted to set the record straight from my point of view. Please feel free to reach out to other Django devs to verify my claims if needed :)

this is maybe a new category: sell licenses for professional use
Pros
whole code is freely available

cons
probably a lot of scary unhandy legal stuff
Osirix
Redhat
Owncloud
Some on this list have this approach

Thanks for your great article, I made a translation to Chinese, if you plan to add link to translated version.
Here is the link: https://github.com/wizicer/FinancialSupportForOpenSource

Thanks for the very nice summary of the various models to finance a project! :) I just wanted to add to the Start a project while currently employed section that some companies are also sponsoring for any open source project you might be working on your free time.

You can read more about how the Spice Program works in our company: http://futurice.com/blog/sponsoring-free-time-open-source-activities. Hopefully this didn't come out as too pushy marketing, but as a new possible example for the list.

I would've created a new pull request but I'm not sure if this would be a new section on its own or an addition to the existing section(Start a project while currently employed). For example the existing cons are not exactly true for Spice Program:

Risk of undue company influence

The program allows any contribution, without any ties to the company.

Can lead to complicated governance later down the line

All IPR is owned by the employees, not the company.

I found this view of Terry Lambert - Apple Core OS Kernel Team; technical lead on several projects over 8 years:

https://www.quora.com/How-should-open-source-programmers-make-money/answer/Terry-Lambert

His response on "how to make money from open-source" is quite interesting...

Hi, first, I want to say that I have your book and I think it's really great -- thank you for publishing it.

Caddy is currently listed under the "Open Core" section, which was true for a brief time when we tried it, but Caddy's sustainability has largely been met through sponsorships at this point. (Not sponsorware, but sponsorships.) A slightly fuller history is explained on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server)

I wonder if we could separate the "Advertising / sponsorships" category into two separate categories. Because although we are funded solely through sponsorships, we do almost no advertising: the sponsorships pay for continued development which is in these professionals' and businesses' best interest. Some businesses also use private support or get development discounts.

I wrote about some of these patterns: https://matt.life/writing/the-asymmetry-of-open-source

How'd you feel if we create a Sponsorships category and move Caddy there?

As a user I would like to see FundRequest added to the list of Bounty projects
FundRequest : A marketplace for open source software development (https://fundrequest.io)

Hi I came across this blog post about an annual grant for students working on open source software, thought it might be a good addition to the list https://thejeshgn.com/projects/nagarathna-memorial-grant/

I tend to think about things from the point-of-view of projects as well. And often, I think that projects need to acquire resources to do work. Sustainable projects are those where the resources needed to do the work to keep the project going continue to be acquired over time. Given this, and the fact that your current page is about how an individual can get resources, it would be useful to have a similar document for a project. This might include many of the same things, but it also might include other resources, such as volunteer labor, company-paid labor, donated services (hardware, software, cycle, bytes, etc.), and other things.

If you are interested in this, I would be happy to contribute. If not, eventually I will start something like this myself :)

Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/) is a worthy replacement.

https://oysterprotocol.com/

Thought this was a cool set of resources: https://twitter.com/sehurlburt/status/1091589067605606400?s=21

Video series:

• Advice on making money off open source software
• Enterprise sales process
• Introduction to networking
• How to ask for things when networking

but it's not a case study, not a maintainer talk, etc so I didn't really know where to put it....so I'm just adding it as an issue here 😇Will close out eventually if I don't find it a home.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to call SQLite dual license. They will sell you "license" as in a proof of purchase but the code is always licensed under the public domain.

QT is an example of something that is genuinely dual license.

Hi, thanks very much for your great article, I made a translation to Spanish, if you plan to add link to translated version.
Here is the link: https://github.com/fredbesan/lemonade-stand

I can't seem to dig up the source, but at one point (maybe 6-7 years ago) I read a post by someone who had created this really interesting model for funding their service.

Basically, they wrote some glue code that connected their hosting, dns, and bank account in such a way that the costs of the service could be automated paid form the bank account. The interesting bit was that the site monitored the bank account and progressively degraded experience when certain thresholds were not met. The idea was that if people were getting use from the service, and the bank account was running low, they should know that it needed their support, or it would disappear.

In the post, he acknowledged that the site only degraded according to it's financial needs at-cost. But I see no reason why it couldn't also work while taking into account a desired "budget" of the creator. So if they feel that they should be able to make $200 off the site per month, they could be transparent about that. And paying them out as creator each month could be factored into the costs of running the site. If the hosting + dns + cost of living of the creator are not met, features start to be disabled progressively.

I think about this model a lot, and it's on my back-burner to someday create a framework for facilitating this. Right now, there is perhaps not enough primary resources to include this here, but I'm hoping that someone remembers that post, and can help me dredge it up :)

For me the only interesting section is: https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand#get-hired-by-a-company-to-work-on-project

Everything else only applies to people who already have very popular projects or are willing to risk/invest time or job security to achieve said popularity. Unfortunately I am neither of those.

What would be extremely valuable for me is a a list of companies that hire for OSS work or allow such work (and to what degree). Is there anything like that?

The current tagline, in my option, leaves something to be desired. I won't go into detail, so I'll share my alternative.

From: "a handy guide to making money in open source"

To : "a handy guide to financial sustainability for open source projects"

... or something along those lines.

Apologies if this isn't the right venue, but I thought it would be as good of a place as any for the conversation.

I'm starting a new business called runcommand for WordPress-based businesses to purchase enterprise support for WP-CLI. But it's a support with a twist: as a part of their plan, they also get to suggest ideas for new commands, or prioritize development of features against existing commands. The exact mechanics of how this will work is TBD, but the gist of the idea is that they'll get some number of tokens to put toward a given development task, and once the development task has enough tokens it will proceed forward.

I feel confident there's enough overlap between the companies in my target audience that they could greatly benefit from ongoing improvements to common infrastructure if they could somehow share the maintenance burden. Right now, the cost of sharing infrastructure is high — a company has to shoulder the burden of maintaining an entire project. runcommand permits companies to "rent" maintenance burden in a sense.

Can you think of a name or any prior art for this idea? I'd like to think I could just copy someone else's existing model, instead of needing to invent all of the project management / development workflow from scratch.

https://github.com/fredexed/crypto-funding-ops/blob/master/README.md

consider linking https://github.com/ralphtheninja/open-funding

Seems to be also a valuable resource, especially for grants section ( https://github.com/ralphtheninja/open-funding#grants may be linked ).

For example I found nlnet through their list what resulted in a funded grant.

Could we add Open-classifieds.com to the showcase? https://github.com/open-classifieds/openclassifieds2 you can read a bit more about FOSS for profit here too http://open-classifieds.com/2014/02/03/how-we-make-money-open-source-for-profit/

We earn from consultancy, themes and since 1 year ago SaaS https://yclas.com/

thanks

Very differently models IMO. Often open core ends up focusing on crippling the product so that entities will pay money for the good features. Typically Open Core companies also offer support, services, and training, though I'd say thats not exclusive, and often exists throughout all open source companies.

Sentry for example has a paid offering, but its entirely open source (our enterprise offering is the same code).

I'd look at things like Cassandra, Riak, Cloudera, Mesosphere, Docker, and Elastic to classify in these, but I think most of them will fall in the open core world.

(I realize that a lot of the above are "real" companies, but I think thats an important differentiator in projects that make money)

Hi @nayafia .. would you mind adding Code Sponsor to this list?

Offer fremium Software as a service.

In the past few years, I've been noticing a lot of developers who create and make money from educational content (blog posts, videos, livestreams, etc). Feels like an important revenue stream to acknowledge in here.

When I first wrote this guide, I lumped all that into "Books and merchandise", but this category feels a little dated. So much more is happening on that front now! Might rename to "Content creation" or something like that, add some non-book examples, etc.

Will get to it uhhhh one day maybe, leaving this issue open as a reminder. Also, if anyone has great examples of developers creating content (Kent Dodds and Egghead.io are my canonical examples 😇), comment here and I'll add them in!

It would be nice to give a definition/explain of each method before listing pros/cons. Not everyone is familiar with the wording or the concepts behind.

Otherwise, great read !

Scanning through your list, it seems as though you left out a pay-what-you-want business model, which elementaryOS uses both for its OS and for apps in its AppCenter: https://medium.com/elementaryos/building-the-future-of-elementary-os-9df3fa940b67 .

Idea here change from using referral links to collect Bitcoins to provide a bigger vision whereby the FOSS community creates crypto-licenses and companies using FOSS software of a large enough size or market cap are required to pay licensing fees to open source developers but the little guys get to ride for free so they can't have a chance of competing.

http://github.com/sponsors ?

Just wanted to THANK YOU for such a helpful and awesome resource!😀 . Thanks for contributing to OSS!

"Packages No packages published" is displayed right now, fortunately this pointless section can be removed.

Edit repo page config to remove it (cog next to the description).

I am not making a PR as it is defined in proprietary github settings, not in a git repository - and I have no rights to modify repo settings.

Removing releases section in case of this repo also may be useful.