3 ms·
The sad thing is, that conflict of interest exists for nearly every open-source project out there. The only real way to make money from creating open source is
by strommen 12y ago
The sad thing is, that conflict of interest exists for nearly every open-source project out there. The only real way to make money from creating open source is to do consulting based on your expertise, or an"open-core" model like nginx. Both of these become less profitable as the quality of the open-source code increases.
- justincormack 12y agoThe worst is small projects that do one thing well. Although you can produce a stream of them to fill a niche. Most consultancy is around bloated projects.
- technomancy 12y agoIt's odd that the article doesn't discuss the most common[1] ways in which corporations contribute to free software: by employing the maintainers and allowing them to spend a portion of their time at work improving the software. I know of nearly a hundred people in the same situation (albeit often with much lower-profile projects than OpenSSL) and I know zero programmers working on open-core projects. The consulting model is a lot more common than open-core, but nowhere near as common as the employment model. [1] - in my own experience