Different ways an open-source project can make some money
Over at thinkingphp.org Felix has written an article for the digg masses with the misleading title “5 Innovative Ways Open Source Can generate Money!”. Misleading, because he doesn’t describe 5 ways, and most ways he describes are not that innovative.
Nonetheless, it is an interesting question how an open-source project can make some money to pay its bills (server infrastructure, internet connectivity, domains, etc.). Here some possible ways (the first three are from the aforementioned article):
- Donations
- Merchandising
- Paid support
- Consulting
- Writing articles/books
- Ads
- Sponsors
- Providing some commercial services (e.g. private subversion repository on CakeForge)
Not really worldshaking, isn’t it? But anyway, the difficult part is to find the right mix for your project, and to implement it in a way it fits your project.
[...] About the article itself: Some people have pointed out that it actually only contains 3 ways of making money and 2 ways to aid the process. I realized that while typing as well, but hey a list of 5 sounded better for the digg.com crowd then a list of 3,- I appoligize for this misleading information ; ). Another group of people called all of the ideas lame and stupid, while some other’s expressed that they found them informative. But what really caught my eye were the comments about open source in general, which brings me to the next point: [...]