While traditional cloud providers have certainly made it difficult for open source companies to monetize the cloud, it seems that the marriage between decentralized cloud protocols and open-source is opening up new opportunities for OSS monetization.

Decentralization takes the principles of open source and applies them to the very infrastructure on which software runs.

At Storj, for example, we have an Open Source Partner Program that attempts to solve the ‘Amazon Problem’ by enabling any open source project to generate revenue every time their end users store data in the cloud.

Storj tracks usage on the network and returns a significant portion of the revenue earned when data from an open source project is stored on the platform. Critically, this enables open source projects to derive sustainable revenue from usage, whether by commercial customers or non-paying open source users.

In my opinion, this can help drive and support the next wave of Open Source monetization models.