Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source
by strommen on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:59AM
(#7709864)
The sad thing is, that conflict of interest exists for nearly every open-source project out there. The only real way to make money from creating open source is to do consulting based on your expertise, or an"open-core" model like nginx. Both of these become less profitable as the quality of the open-source code increases.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source
by technomancy on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @12:24PM
(#7711041)
It's odd that the article doesn't discuss the most common[1] ways in which corporations contribute to free software: by employing the maintainers and allowing them to spend a portion of their time at work improving the software. I know of nearly a hundred people in the same situation (albeit often with much lower-profile projects than OpenSSL) and I know zero programmers working on open-core projects. The consulting model is a lot more common than open-core, but nowhere near as common as the employment model.
[1] - in my own experience
Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source
by justincormack on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @09:24AM
(#7709974)
The worst is small projects that do one thing well. Although you can produce a stream of them to fill a niche. Most consultancy is around bloated projects.