How do free software developers live and earn money?
Hello, Habravchane!
I think many of you ask or ask yourself the question “where do denyuzhki come from to develop all this, what do I use legally and don’t cry to anyone?”. And it also happens that some people, by virtue of their kindness, very much want to make their creation free and maybe even open, but immediately think that they also love to eat ... Moreover, this question has already been heard in the open spaces of Habrahabr.ru/blogs/open_source/ 28898 , but honestly, I did not find answers to all my questions there.
So it became very interesting to me. And I decided to figure out what was happening, for that I first opened my favorite question solver (http://www.google.com) and asked him to read.
So, what options have I identified:
1. You can mostly live on various donations, such as wikipedia. In some countries, donations are stimulated by state tax breaks (thanks to the McBernar user).
2. You can sell ads, many people do this, for example, my favorite question solver :) Also there are all sorts of blog services, social networks and much more. If you look at the software, then FireFox, which, though indirectly, from search engines, can serve as an example, but they, in turn, are all the same due to advertising or AOL Instant Messenger clients.
3. You can develop paid software and distribute it to younger younger brothers, for example Opera, in addition to income from a search bar, gets money from selling a browser for various embedded systems. Or a Qt library with two licenses. Also as the hablauser vlsergey suggests in the comments:
In open source, it is usually not the “trimmed brothers” that go, but the very cores of the system - which implement 80% of the functionality (yeah, written in 20% of the time). Then, with the help of an open community, companies get the opportunity to refine the core of the system, while they themselves focus on managing the community and adding 20% of the chips that the commercial system needs.
OpenJTA (Kodo) => WebLogic, WebSphere
MySQL => MySQL Enterprise
Eclipse => WebApplication Developer (IBM), Software Architect and others
4. You can sell support and implementation.
5. It is possible to produce two products and giving away one for free to increase sales of the second, for example, Sun develops, maintains and develops Java for free, and sells hardware.
6. The project may develop on the pure enthusiasm of developers, but to be honest, while it seems to me more than an exception (although I may be very mistaken?)
Nevertheless, for me it is still not clear at the expense of what some projects live in and first of all these are various software frameworks (RubyOnRails, Grails, Spring, etc.), libraries (hibernate), languages (ruby, python) and so on ... Is it really in fact, this is all only support + advertising + donations? After all, they bring a huge income, not so long ago I ran across the numbers about how much money RoR brought (but I can't find right now), there were not small numbers.
I hope in the comments there will be more examples for each model, and also I will be supplemented with other models that I have not yet noticed.
I think many of you ask or ask yourself the question “where do denyuzhki come from to develop all this, what do I use legally and don’t cry to anyone?”. And it also happens that some people, by virtue of their kindness, very much want to make their creation free and maybe even open, but immediately think that they also love to eat ... Moreover, this question has already been heard in the open spaces of Habrahabr.ru/blogs/open_source/ 28898 , but honestly, I did not find answers to all my questions there.
So it became very interesting to me. And I decided to figure out what was happening, for that I first opened my favorite question solver (http://www.google.com) and asked him to read.
So, what options have I identified:
1. You can mostly live on various donations, such as wikipedia. In some countries, donations are stimulated by state tax breaks (thanks to the McBernar user).
2. You can sell ads, many people do this, for example, my favorite question solver :) Also there are all sorts of blog services, social networks and much more. If you look at the software, then FireFox, which, though indirectly, from search engines, can serve as an example, but they, in turn, are all the same due to advertising or AOL Instant Messenger clients.
3. You can develop paid software and distribute it to younger younger brothers, for example Opera, in addition to income from a search bar, gets money from selling a browser for various embedded systems. Or a Qt library with two licenses. Also as the hablauser vlsergey suggests in the comments:
In open source, it is usually not the “trimmed brothers” that go, but the very cores of the system - which implement 80% of the functionality (yeah, written in 20% of the time). Then, with the help of an open community, companies get the opportunity to refine the core of the system, while they themselves focus on managing the community and adding 20% of the chips that the commercial system needs.
OpenJTA (Kodo) => WebLogic, WebSphere
MySQL => MySQL Enterprise
Eclipse => WebApplication Developer (IBM), Software Architect and others
4. You can sell support and implementation.
5. It is possible to produce two products and giving away one for free to increase sales of the second, for example, Sun develops, maintains and develops Java for free, and sells hardware.
6. The project may develop on the pure enthusiasm of developers, but to be honest, while it seems to me more than an exception (although I may be very mistaken?)
Nevertheless, for me it is still not clear at the expense of what some projects live in and first of all these are various software frameworks (RubyOnRails, Grails, Spring, etc.), libraries (hibernate), languages (ruby, python) and so on ... Is it really in fact, this is all only support + advertising + donations? After all, they bring a huge income, not so long ago I ran across the numbers about how much money RoR brought (but I can't find right now), there were not small numbers.
I hope in the comments there will be more examples for each model, and also I will be supplemented with other models that I have not yet noticed.
')
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/60349/
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