How To Earn Money From Open Source

Free access does not mean open source software has to be free of cost. There are ways to alleviate the pressure of having to continuously maintain projects that suck valuable time away, time you’re happy to share, but time nonetheless. The problem arises when money is introduced to a community that balks at the mention of commercialism as it pertains to open source. Henry Zhu, the maintainer of Babel, countered the “freemium” ideology in an excellent TechCrunch article written months ago when he said, “We trust startups with millions of VC money and encourage a culture of ‘failing fast,’ yet somehow the idea of giving to volunteers who may have showed years of dedication is undesirable?”

In response to burnout, large open source repositories like Babel that take on a core group of maintainers have turned to sources of revenue that can co-exist with the open source creed. You can take advantage of these opportunities as well.

Donations and grants

An innovative open source project can take advantage of crowdsourcing by linking its Kickstarter or GoFundMe account within its GitHub page. This may not seem to much different from the usual “pay for my coffee” Paypal donations at first, but many projects don’t detail why donations are needed. Many users think that projects are maintained by a horde of developers who have plenty…