As an Open Source developer/contributor, you may find that helping the community and giving back to it is the most possible reward you could get.
However, in today’s economy, you will still need to pay the bills. So you may wonder “How exactly do Open Source Code developers make a living and still have time for the community?”
The answer to that question is simple. They make money through their Open Source Code!
How, you ask? Let’s take a further look into it. In this quick guide, we will get you through the different methods of monetizing your Open Source Code.
Open Source Sponsorship
Most, if not all, Open Source Developers are GitHub dwellers. GitHub is considered to be the home of Open Source Code and the Open Source Community.
On Github, Open Source Developers or contributors often make use of the GitHub Sponsorship program which allows them to gain sponsorship for their open source projects.
This is one of the greatest ways to make money as GitHub doesn’t take a single percentage of the provided sponsorship.
It is also possible to get Open Source Sponsorship from a variety of different places such as Patreon, the Open Collective, and self driven links.
The downside of this is that sponsorship is often difficult to get, you’d have to heavily market your Open Source Project as well as wait for people to take a look at your project and sponsor it also as a support for the community.
This takes us to the 2nd and most important method of monetizing open source code.
PieceX OSS (Paid Support)
The most prominent way for Open Source Developers to monetize their projects is to provide paid support.
Everyone uses Open Source Code, and it is very popular that due to common reliability on open source, various issues occur.
A startup may try to build their entire business on a single open source project and then have difficulties navigating through it as they have no knowledge of the code arrangement, resulting in major confusion, time/resource burnout, and occasionally failure to completely integrate.
When this happens, which it does very often, most users of the Open Source Code try to find a way to reach out to the Open Source Developer.
The reason why they do that is because they often need support from them, whether it is to navigate through the code, to add/remove features, understand more about the dissection of the project, or to request debugging or implementation services, there is always something that a user may need from an Open Source Developer.
Hence, PieceX OSS is the best platform for Open Source Support. This platform opens up great new opportunities to the market as it allows Open Source Developers to list Open Source Support plans.
The way this works is by providing paid support for Open Source Code on the marketplace so owners of the Open Source code can benefit as sellers of the support service and thus monetizing their open source code.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Software as a service may just be one of the most convenient ways to monetize your Open Source Code.
With a simple cloud delivery model, you can host your very own software, especially specific types of products that offer complete Application such as Marketing tools, automation tools, etc..
Keep in mind that the downside (or upside) of this is that if you host the software yourself, you will be required to maintain it, keep up with its security, code issues, and anything related to the dangers of hosting.
That aside, doing so is a great way to target non-tech developers and business/marketing teams to make use of your software without having to go through the mumbo-jumbo of tech, granting you, the open source developer, a great market to tap into and make money from.
Paid Feature Requests
Sometimes users of Open Source Code just want specific features and want to reach out to contributors, maintainers, designers, or developers of a specific open source code in order to request that feature from them for a price.
Paid Feature Requests are a great way to monetize Open Source Code as it is a very hyper-intuitive method and open source users ALWAYS need new features.
Finding the perfect place to offer those services may be difficult, which is why PieceX OSS remains the most likely useful platform to use.
PieceX OSS’s current model makes it so that you can offer the creation features in your One Time Support Plans or your Extended Support Plans for a price relevant to the difficulty and complexity of the feature itself.
Conclusion
There are many ways to monetize Open Source Code, but before thinking of monetization, it is important to keep in mind that the project in which you contributed or developed is well-made and that its current state makes it significant within the millions of open source codes available across the internet.
If you, however, have your gears ready and you are sure of the quality of your code, following one (or more) of the methods above will definitely increase your chances at gaining a passive revenue stream for your open source code.
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