Make Money With Open Source What is Open Source? Community Free - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Make Money With Open Source

What is Open Source? Community Free software vs. open source Licenses: GPL vs. LGPL vs. MIT/Apache Foundations: Linux, Apache, Eclipse, … Similar: Open Data, Open Hardware, Open Knowledge, ...

Advantages of OS  “ cheaper”  high customization options  transparency  innovation (attractive to experts and later employees)  education  increased trust to young baking companies  form standards  usually more secure (but can be the opposite like with the previously underfunded openssl)  self-hosted easily possible → increased privacy  authors get free marketing

Disadvantages of OS  Unclear risks e.g. not really cheaper:  often not production ready  often need in-house expertise  no development: 95% of OS projects die after 1 year  hard to create trust  better with backing company or foundation  contribution activity not guaranteed  authors get free blame, seldom positive feedback

Many options To earn money you could:  ask for donations  do advertisement (corporate sponsor)  offer consulting and support  offer a less restrictive license: dual licensing with (A)GPL  hide features (open core) or documentation or executable binaries or test suite  combine with hardware  offer software as a service more details at Wikipedia: Business models for OS software

Examples  corporate sponsor: Firefox, Linux, Android, Chromium, Git, Kubernetes, Java, Swift, React, NetBeans, TensorFlow, vscode  offer consulting and support: Red Hat, IBM  dual licensing: MySQL, Neo4J, MongoDB, Apple  open core: nginx, JetBrains, VirtualBox, Artifactory  software as a service: Wordpress, Discourse, GraphHopper  donations: Firefox, Piwik  mixed: Ubuntu, Elastic, GitHub  grow closed: SugarCRM dropped OS license in 2013  fork was created (SuiteCRM) Story about the only real “open source company” Red Hat

What’s the best option? It depends What kind of software do you have? A library, an operating system, a end user app? But my personal impression is: – open core and software as a service or – get acquired by a bit donor

What’s the best option? In general:  making money is hard, often against creating a viable community around the project  avoid launching competitors using the same code challenges when doing consulting:  staying focused to create a product  release work for customer under OS license challenges when creating SaaS out of the OS project:  getting time to improve OS and building the SaaS  pricing is hard as you “compete” with your own project

We chose SaaS History of GraphHopper GmbH:  Do consulting to increase value of OS project  Built SaaS product out of valuable OS project  Implement closed source features to grow demand of SaaS  Open source features to grow demand of OS project  Reduce consulting to stay focused  Grow only with customers, not VCs – independence!

Open vs. Closed Our software core is open source We use open data

Open vs. Closed

Successful Open Source Project make the project lasting for years: 1. earn money 2. mental health 1. ignore blame, write down praise 2. do not promise features or set dead lines 3. ignore temporary slow progress 3. focus! 4. marketing: blog posts, speak at conferences like FOSDEM 5. strong community: enforce public discussion 6. + be gentle dictator

Make Money With Open Source Make Money With Open Source peter.karich@graphhopper.com