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.<p>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.<p>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<p>Best regards,
Joerg<p>PS: if you want to get the Survey Results you can join an email list at: https://mailchi.mp/8e59bb1c13db/state-of-oss-monetization
<i>> How much of their Revenue (in Percent) should companies contribute to OSS?</i><p>This 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.
Are you developing OSS or ransomware?<p>If you want to make money from your software, make it closed source and SELL IT.<p>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.<p>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.
Glad you are asking this question... but... I think it would be wise to ask what a respondent's motivation for building/maintaining their open source project really is. Often times, monetization is really low on the priority list.
Essentially, most of open source is slave labor for big tech who can build their services on top of the "contributions" while extracting ridiculous amounts of value from them and giving maybe pennies back to a single sponsored contributor.<p>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.<p>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.
The best way to monetize an open source project so that the whole community can benefit is by launching a blockchain token and then provide a service around it based on the open source project. Unfortunately, the powers that be won't allow such tokens to succeed. Only scam crypto projects are allowed to succeed.