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

Make Money With 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, ...

What is Open Source?

 “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

Advantages 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

Disadvantages of OS

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

Many options

 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

Examples

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

What’s the best option?

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!

We chose SaaS

Our software core is open source We use open data

Open vs. Closed

Open vs. Closed

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

Successful Open Source Project

Make Money With Open Source Make Money With Open Source

peter.karich@graphhopper.com