Four Proven Monetization Techniques For Open Source Developers

Let's face it, an open source programmer who contributes code to the community isn't generally motivated by money (unless she works at a "FOSS friendly" firm such as Red Hat or Canonical). In fact, she doesn't even know about how to monetize or earn income by contributing to that development which she so rightly deserves, assuming its a highly used product and many people use it.

In general, an individual open source dev's mind is so much ingrained with the technicalities of development itself (such as programming languages, git repos, change requests, libraries and frameworks, etc.) that she doesn't pay much attention to the financial aspect of earning any remuneration from that activity such as setting up a Paypal or Patreon account, etc.

In this article, we will look at some ways though which a creative open source programmer can monetize her contribution. Not all methods may work for everyone, and some may even try a combination of more than one methods.

1. The Donation Model: This is perhaps the oldest way of monetizing a FOSS project, many popular FOSS projects such as GNOME and GNU/Linux earn funds for their project through this model. However, the success of this model largely depends on the number of patrons who are willing to provide patronage to creative people like programmers and unfortunately, that number is decreasing steadily. This model used to work great at one time but the world is getting more and more greedy, more and more capitalist than socialist, so this model may no longer work for all but the most popular and renowned projects. Nevertheless, you may still open an account at PayPal and/or Patreon and thus declare your willingness to accept donations to fund your FOSS project.
2. The Advertising Model: Advertising using Google Adsense is a much better way to monetize things in this era compared to the donations model. If you have a web-based or smartphone app based FOSS product (or even a blog related to your FOSS product), this method is quite ideal because for every page view and click on an advertisement on your app, this method will earn you some funds though Adsense. Though the efficacy of this method is decreasing with the increasing usage of ad-blockers, there is enough sustainability in this model as long as the kind of power users who use blockers remain a small minority.
3. The Freemium Model: This is the model which was recently used by Magento and SugarCRM, two popular open source PHP projects. Basically, you create a more feature-filled (and thus, "premium") version of your app which has more features than the FOSS version (which should be kept relatively bare-bones in comparison). Even Intellij IDEA, a popular Java-based IDE uses this model for funding.
4. The Freelance Consultant Model: Yet another funding model which may or may not be used along with the Freemium model. Basically, you provide a standard set of features in your main app but charge for any services or customization of code/design additionally. The famous FOSS company called Red Hat works on this model primarily. Their operating system (RHEL) is entirely free on its own but they only charge for providing a service or customization of the product. For small individual developers, offering this service through a freelance platform such as Fiverr, FiveSquid or Theme Forest is more suitable.