While trickle down economics doesn’t work, “trickle down sustainability” as it’s applied to free and open-source software is a concept that might just work. It’s not a silver bullet and will not solve the problem of FOSS funding once and for all. But as with most problems, we’re not trying to get from A to Z, but from A to B. A step forward in the right direction. What’s the idea? Why frontend software? Because this is what users see, […]

We encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html In Chapter 1 we talked about one of the core challenges around FOSS monetization: open source licenses allow anyone to freely distribute copies of it. If a person starts charging money for it, without any additional benefit (e.g. enterprise support), somebody else will come along and redistribute it for free. This is why selling enterprise support has been a successful model for many […]

This is the first post of a series about funding free and open source software. The fact that lots of open source software is largely underfunded is well documented. Many successful open source projects are successful because they stand on the shoulders of giants who absorb the cost of running it. A few reach world-wide success through adoption and find ways to sustain themselves via corporate/individual sponsorships. Ok great; but what about you? Say you have a project. It’s open-source. […]