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Comment by gitgud | Hacker News Reader

Working enough making money purely from Open-source is difficult to achieve and usually requires; amazing projects, a good reputation, a big network of followers.

But there's also some good monetisation strategies:

- Consulting, at the bottom of your project "Hire the creator"

- Donations, at the bottom of your project "Donate here"

- Open-core, have an open-source core and a premium version with more features (these suck)

- Sponsorware, Open-source the library after enough people have paid you for it [1]

The easiest is to create open-source projects in your day job (where needed). It makes for a better architecture of modular components and plugins and helps you learn open-source development without the pressure of making money from it.

[1] https://twitter.com/calebporzio/status/1221437814748909571

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> Open-core, have an open-source core and a premium version with more features (these suck)

Out of genuine curiosity, are there some egregious examples that merits (these suck), or is it more of a blanket statement?

I would love to avoid making those mistakes.

"Open-core sucks" is a blanket statement as the incentives of the business do not align with the users of the project. And as a result, in my book it's a red flag for an open-source project, and I can't think of a single project I like which does this.

The incentive of an "Open-core" business is to convert people to the premium version of the product.

This has the effect of hindering/restricting development on the community/free-version, as it's vital that the community version needs to be worse than the premium version.

Almost any monetisation strategy has this effect on open-source though. Say for example consulting; if you're paid to help users setup/configure your project, then your incentive is to have people struggle with your project so they need to pay you for help...

As you can tell I'm a little pessimistic, but in my opinion almost any project that is open-source and trying to make money off it's users, has incentives that will negatively impact the project and it's users...

Hope this helps, I'm still open to projects which have any of these monetisation strategies, but they have to be of much, much higher quality for me to seriously consider.

I think open-core can work well, when done right - as long as you're not necessarily crippling your FOSS offering compared to the paid version(s). When the code is likely to be used by other businesses, for example. There's generally a trade-off between time and price: use the open core, develop your own additions to add in the extra functionality you want -- or buy a license and use the "premium" features.

I can see there's a whole ecosystem built up around kubernetes, cloud management and microservice meshes, for example. You can set it all up for free using the FOSS offerings but it will sink a lot of time learning how to and maintaining the stack. Or you can pay to use someone elses "batteries included" distro which can be deployed with a few commands and save yourself a lot of time but spend $$$($..$??).

As long as projects don't actively refuse to accept contributions to the core, respond well to issues, document stuff well and keep a nice pluggable architecture allowing other people to fork it and hack in their own features, you're allowing people to choose between time or money.

Benefits of having a "pro" version also filters down to the open core - if you're wanting to market your product to businesses, you're likely going to spend more effort on making it more user-friendly and therefore documentation and howto guides become more slick and comprehensive.

I also think it can work well.

TimescaleDB is a good example - everything is open, but most is open source. The only parts that you need a commercial license for are "obviously" enterprise/scale features.

I use TimescaleDB in my ISV, and think it's a fantastic tool. Should I ever need the enterprise features, I would gladly pay for them and fund maintenance and growth of a tool I love.

My distilled experience from open-core has also left me a bite wary of those. Not as strong to say they suck, but enough to not embrace them too quickly. I've had too many experiences where I felt that the open source version (and especially the documentation) was neglected so much that you'd have to spend a lot of time getting it to work and figuring stuff out.

It occasionally felt like "open source is a good marketing point, so here's the essential source, good luck, we're not going to help you with anything else, pay us". Fair enough, but that doesn't sound "open source" to me.

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