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Comment by 6cxs2hd6 | Hacker News Reader

Apologies if this is OT, but does anyone have link(s) to a "Making Money From Open Source for Dummies" guide? The only options I'm aware of:

1. Donations.

2. "Open core" or "freemium" model.

3. Paid books/lectures about it.

4. Get hired as a consultant to teach, trouble-shoot, and/or customize.

5. Get hired as an employee to work more on it or something else.

However other than 1, none truly consist of getting paid for the open source per se. Which maybe works out OK, anyway.

To clarify, this is not a rhetorical question where I'm trying to slag on open source. I'm already doing a number of open source projects, and enjoy it. I'm genuinely interested, if I wanted to support myself doing open source, realistically what are the options? And I genuinely don't fully understand how.

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There's lots of approaches (as you note), but if I had to boil them down to a rule of thumb it would be this: give away functionality, charge for convenience.

You love our app, but want an MSI installer so you can deploy it on your network more easily? You can roll your own by checking out our source code here... or you can pay us $X for this already-made-and-thoroughly-tested installer.

You love our app, but want to learn more about how it works? You can browse this repository of 15,000 Doxygen-generated API pages... or you can pay us $Y for this beautiful book that explains everything in plain English.

You love our app, but want someone who can support it if something goes wrong? You can spend ten years turning someone on your staff into an expert on it... or you can pay us $Z for this support contract, and get access to our experts.

This approach can feel counter-intuitive to geeks, because we value functionality more than convenience, so it feels "wrong" to charge for the things we see as needless frills. But in general, people put a lot of value on convenience, and they are more than willing to pay for it if you're willing to provide it.

Sometimes people try the opposite approach -- charging for functionality. (i.e. "Try the open source edition of our app, or pay $X for the Premium Edition and get custom fields!") This rarely works.

Thanks, that's really helpful advice. I'm going to call this The Dead Kennedys principle of monetizing open source.

6. Let people pay you to develop their favourite/urgently needed features on a priority basis

One option is building an open source framework to be the base for your commercial projects. Rails and Django started this way.

What XChat does is charge for the official Windows binary[1] while being open source. I think something like this would be a good option for Zed.

[1] http://xchat.org/windows/

Charge for the installer. If I want to use a tool I do not want to try to compile it

If you are planning on having plugins, some of them could be paid.

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