We're a well funded company. We've raised money from A16Z, Salesforce.com, and a bunch of others.[1]
We have open sourced the clients but Bridge Server is not open source.[2]
How do we make money? We're building this type of software for much larger organizations (think enterprise & government). We're not in the business of charging hackers and students $5.
We're likely going to charge some money for Bridge Cloud as a lot of the startups currently using Bridge prefer to use & pay for Bridge Cloud. It's the peace of mind of not having to deal with ops on a messaging server. Bridge server itself will also cost some money.
But the point is that we're only going to charge the big guys who can easily afford such systems. Their alternative today is to spend tens of millions on an engineering team to build systems in house.
There will always be a generous free tier for Bridge. You can download Bridge right now and pump 40,000 messages per minute through it for FREE. Do you need more? Just call me, I'm happy to bump you up.[3]
We have a setup for companies paying us and need to see the source code. If it's really important to you, we're happy to show you the code.
What can I do to help you evaluate Bridge? Can you shoot me an email? I'm at darshan@getbridge.com.
[1]http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/05/andreessen-horowitz-salesfo...
[2]http://github.com/getbridge
[3]https://www.getbridge.com/start