Hey. I'm the author of Go Micro. An open source framework for Go development. Over the past 10 years I never managed to find a sustainable way to keep working on this. I bootstrapped with my own savings. Meaning I quit my job and burned what was in a bank account for 9-10 months (most people don't have this luxury). I then managed to find a corporate sponsor (again a friend doing me a favour which most people don't have the luxury of). And after about 4 years of doing that I raised VC funding to try build a product around the framework and turn it into a real company. That went very poorly. So I think open source sustainability is hard and from first hand experience I never managed to make it work. I'm curious to know if anyone figured it out? We know elastic, hashicorp, redis, etc. But did anyone make it work in a smaller capacity? I even remember the story of Mike Perham with Sidekiq and doing like $1m in sales solo. But again I never managed to make any of it work myself.
Wordpress and Nextcloud come to mind. Arguably Red Hat as well. A web search turns up more companies that worked out how to do this, although I've not heard of most of them, so I don't know.<p>In my own ventures, I don't try. My commercial software is sold under a proprietary license, not open source, although I do provide the source code with the license. My open source offerings are not intended to make money.