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Ask HN: Open-source projects that we never heard of them that become profitable?
Hey HN,
Do you know OSS project which are not famous like we already know well (redis,sidekiq ..)
which created by small team or 1 developer and become their main or side profitable income?
Thanks
- patio11 7y agoYes. One (one!) gets there primarily via donations. All the rest are operated as small software companies which happen to have a OSS product available. To the next obvious question "Who are you talking about?", I'm going to demur, because most people making money in OSS, like most making money selling SaaS (or anything else, for that matter), don't really see much value in getting that fact blabbed on the Internets. Information travels at the speed of (your liquid refreshment of choice).
- rajacombinator 7y agoCould you expand more on this point? With your background in the space, would be interesting to hear your insights on what proportion of SaaS businesses fall into the secretive vs. “any press or leads are good” categories. And when to go with one strategy or the other.
- pkrotich 7y agoI developed osTicket and we now have a growing profitable business- we have a SaaS offering and provide commercial support to enterprise users.
- stockkid 7y agoInteresting. What is your SaaS offering and how does it relate to the open source product?
- pkrotich 7y agoIt’s basically a hosted version of osTicket - Supportsystem.com
- umen 7y agoGreat example , this what I meant when asking . How did you come with the idea for ticketing app ? And why oos?
- pkrotich 7y agoos for open source. osCommerce was popular then so it influenced naming!
- realty_geek 7y agoWow, that's awesome!! I looked up your story and that is awesome too. I would love my open source real estate website builder project (https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder) to achieve something similar. Hope you don't mind, I've reached out to you via linked in.
- pkrotich 7y agoThanks - I’ll reach back.
- yitchelle 7y agoCongrats on the success! Interesting logo design with the Kangaroo. Is that a pun play of the phonetics of os.. vs Oz.. (slang for Australia) ?
- pkrotich 7y agoNot really - when osTicket started, circa 2004, having a mascot was the rage - think MySQL etc. Funnily Kangaroo has given us affinity from Australian users... perhaps an osTrich would been a better choice.
- croh 7y agoFreeSWITCH. You can check any opensource telecom tech. Most contributors turn themselves as consultants.