▲ ▼ Monetizing open-source projects
Open-source software and hardware form the backbone of several early stage startup's infrastructure. Open-source projects which are not backed by large corporations are often run by the creators in their individual capacity and with the support of voluntary contributors in their free time.
These projects become successful because they create value for the consumers, but it rarely creates monetary value for its creators. If the creators, volunteers get remunerated for their time; they would be able to put more time into their projects, improving its quality and make faster releases.
On occasions, consumers do donate to these creators for their effort. But, the mechanism for donations are not straight forward, middle-men gains and the notion of donation seems altruistic where as it is not in this case (as the open-source project directly creates value to the consumer, often saving lot of money).
So, we need better monetization mechanisms for open-source projects, where the creators and contributors can outsource the business development of their project to someone else for getting compensated and focus on what they do best.
Totally agree on this problem.. here's a new attempt at helping alleviate it :)
GitNFT enables developers to autograph and mint NFTs of their GitHub commits and list them in the OpenSea marketplace for collectors to buy.
We think commits are a great collector item. They're unique, have verifiable authorship, and are immutable by design. Moreover, many of them store substantial collector value, either for their historical significance, the coolness/aesthetics of their content, or the popularity of the author.
Happy minting and collecting :)
https://gitnft.quine.sh
Hi everyone! My name is Max and I'm working on GitCom - community-driven open source marketplace.
GitCom is a platform to monetize open source more efficiently, we believe that it's hard to sustain open source project (especially small/medium-sized) on donations only, that's why we offer developers multiple ways to get financial support for their open source projects.
For users, it will provide an easy way for users to support independent developers via subscription or donations and get rewards in return
For developers: help to earn from their open source projects via multiple monetization plans such as open-core, subscription, donations and so on.
This project is 100% open source (available at github.com/gitcomteam) and we hope to fill that gap in open source monetization. Because we believe that it's really hard to sustain a small/medium-sized open source on donations only, and we offering a solution to change that.
Website: https://gitcom.org
Congratulations on the launch, sounds good!
Thanks for the advice!
Do you mean platform like https://alternativeto.net/? If so then yeah this is a good idea actually and it's a great way to get businesses on the platform. I'll definitely think about this more in the future.
Or have I missed anything?
alternativeto.net like feature can be one aspect of it, I'm suggesting actively marketing the open-source projects and competing with paid products i.e. considering there will ROI in the form of training, support, SLA etc. for the open-source solutions you're promoting.
GitHub's sponsor program (https://github.com/sponsors) is addressing this need gap, not only they are matching individual contributions with their own funds, but also not charging any fees are covering the payment processing fees for the first year as well.
Google has announced 'Criticality Score' to identify open-source projects which are critical for the modern infrastructure for funding them via Open Source Security Foundation - https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/12/finding-critical-open-source-projects.html .