Top Ten Ways to Make Money With Your Open Source Products

Posted by Ahmad Barirani in Management, Marketing      1 comment

Oct
22

Gone are the days that some could label open source development as being communistic. Today, many firms make money with open source development. This is a survey of the top ten ways to make money with your open source products:

1. Support: offer support around your open source product. Of course this is an easy one as most open source firms base their income on support.
2. Sales: well, this is an easy one too. Not because the product is licensed under GPL that anybody can go on and play with its source code. We see more an more of these kind of products that are often sold as ‘Enterprise’ versions of the open source product.
3. Extensions & plugins: Well, this is a good way to get money, especially from enterprise customers. Every software is always a couple of functions short of customers expectations. Extensions are a great way to overcome this unavoidable issue.
4. Subscriptions: since most software products need maintenance, it might be a good idea to sell the product for free, but collect a subscription for updates.
5. Consulting: well, this is for those who are not in the open source development team, but who offer customization services around open source products. You could also offer project management services for customers who are going to deploy your product. Also, Software as a service (SaaS) is a great example of how open source firms make money.
6. Build yourself a reputation: a lot of programmers have gained notoriety by being lead developers or architects in open source projects. If you write good code, then going open source is a good opportunity to show off your talent.
7. Publish a book: you’ve been building this amazing open source application? Then share your knowledge of the system by writing a book. This goes for those who have built extensions and plugins for open source platform.
8. Give conferences: if you ever become a super start (or even a small star), people might actually want to pay to see and hear you. Conferences actually have something that books cannot offer: close contact with the guru.
9. Advertising: well, you could actually get a lot of traffic to your website. Why not sell ads? Of course, you might not make a lot of money, but its not costing you anything to have a little extra from AdSense.
10. Donations:If you do all or some of the above, why not ask for donations? I mean all those who use the software, but don’t pay on any of the above things still are gaining value from your product. Some of them might actually be conscious of this fact and give a donation.

All these ways of generating revenue are based on the fact that open source software ads a certain value that closed source software does not have. This added value gives a competitive advantage to the open source developer who can then sell byproducts of the knowledge that he has around the open source product. Of course, these are many other ways to make money with open source software. Let me know if there are some that I forgot.