DEV Community: Jörg Rech

PayDevs: The Spotify for Software Libraries

Jörg Rech — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 08:05:00 +0000

We're excited to announce the launch of PayDevs, a platform that helps open-source library maintainers monetize their work. We know that monetization is a crucial aspect of sustainability for the open-source ecosystem, and PayDevs aims to make it easier for developers to get paid for the value they provide.

PayDevs helps maintainers of open source libraries get paid for their work without having to worry about handling individual customers, fundraising, billing, accounting, or taxes. We provide a registry for software libraries where users have to pay us for access, and we pay maintainers for every user of their library that we can measure - just like Netflix or Spotify, but for software libraries and not media.

PayDevs is ideal for open-source library maintainers who want to earn income from their work, as well as for companies and organizations that rely on open-source libraries and want to show their support by paying the maintainers.

We believe PayDevs can be a valuable tool for the open-source community, and we'd love to hear your feedback on it. If you're an open-source library maintainer or a user of open-source libraries, we'd love to hear how PayDevs could work for you.

PS: PayDevs is on ProductHunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/paydevs

Thanks for checking us out!

Open-source Monetization Approaches

Jörg Rech — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 08:03:00 +0000

Open-source software is a type of software that is released under a license that allows users to freely access, modify, and distribute the source code. This approach has many benefits, including increased collaboration, transparency, and innovation. However, it also raises the question of how developers can monetize their OSS projects and sustain their efforts.

This website offers a curated list of over 30 monetization strategies. The list is organized into several categories, including donations, subscriptions, sponsorships, and grants.

Donations are a common and straightforward way to monetize OSS. The website recommends using platforms such as Patreon, Tidelift, and OpenCollective to receive and manage donations from users. These platforms typically allow developers to create customizable donation pages, set up recurring payments, and offer perks and rewards to donors.
Subscriptions are another option for monetizing OSS. Developers can offer subscription-based access to their software, services, or premium features. The website recommends using platforms such as GitHub Sponsors, GitLab Sponsors, and Sponsorship.dev to manage subscriptions. These platforms typically allow developers to set up subscription tiers, track payments, and offer perks and rewards to subscribers.
Sponsorships are another way to monetize OSS. Developers can seek out sponsors who are willing to support their projects with financial or in-kind contributions. The website recommends using platforms such as Bountysource and CodeFund to connect with potential sponsors and manage sponsorships. These platforms typically allow developers to create profiles, showcase their projects, and receive and manage sponsorships.
Grants are a less common but potentially valuable source of funding for OSS projects. Developers can apply for grants from organizations that support OSS, such as the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program, the Linux Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation. The website recommends using platforms such as OpenCollective and Open Source Collective to apply for grants and manage the funds. These platforms typically provide information on available grants, application processes, and reporting requirements.

... and the website lists over 30 more monetization strategies.

In addition to these monetization strategies, the repo also provides valuable resources and advice on other aspects of OSS monetization. These include tips on creating a compelling value proposition, building a community of supporters, and tracking and reporting on the success of monetization efforts.

Overall, the repo https://github.com/PayDevs/awesome-oss-monetization is a valuable resource for anyone interested in monetizing OSS. It offers a curated list of tools and platforms, along with useful tips and advice on how to effectively monetize OSS projects. Whether you are a developer looking for ways to sustain your OSS efforts, or a user looking to support the OSS community, the website is worth exploring.

What are the main problems of maintaining open-source software?

Jörg Rech — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 08:12:00 +0000

Maintaining open-source software can present a number of challenges, including:

Overwhelm: With the growing popularity of open-source software, maintainers can be flooded with an overwhelming number of issues, pull requests, and feature requests from users. This can be difficult to keep up with and can lead to feelings of burnout and frustration.
Lack of support: Many open-source maintainers work on their projects in their free time, without the support or recognition that they deserve. This can lead to feelings of isolation and can make it difficult for maintainers to sustain their projects over the long term.
Limited resources: Maintaining an open-source project often requires a significant amount of time and effort. Maintainers may struggle to find the resources they need to keep up with the demands of the community and may need to rely on donations or other forms of funding to support their work.
Legal and financial complexities: Open-source projects can be subject to a range of legal and financial considerations, such as licensing, trademarks, and taxes. Maintainers may need to navigate these complexities in order to sustain their projects and avoid legal issues.

Overall, the challenges of maintaining open-source software can be significant, and can require a great deal of time, effort, and expertise to overcome.

Thats why we should support open source maintainers and create a sustainable ecosystem.

What happens in a day of an open-source maintainer?

Jörg Rech — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 10:41:20 +0000

The daily activities of an open-source maintainer can vary depending on the specific project and the needs of the community. Some common tasks that a maintainer might perform include:

Reviewing and responding to issues and pull requests submitted by users
Fixing bugs and implementing new features in the project
Communicating with the community and answering questions about the project
Collaborating with other contributors and maintainers on the project
Working on long-term strategic planning and development of the project
Providing support and guidance to users who are having trouble with the project

Overall, the daily work of an open-source maintainer can be demanding and varied, requiring a combination of technical expertise, community management skills, and strategic thinking. Maintainers often work long hours and may need to juggle multiple tasks and priorities in order to keep up with the demands of the community.

Did we miss something? And how would you weight the tasks?

What are the 5 best options to monetize an open-source javascript library? [ChatGPT answer]

Jörg Rech — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 16:50:00 +0000

According to ChatGPT the 5 best options to monetize an open-source JavaScript library are:

Offer paid support or consulting services: Many organizations are willing to pay for expert support and guidance when using an open-source JavaScript library. By offering paid support or consulting services, maintainers can generate revenue while also providing valuable assistance to users.
Develop and sell a proprietary version: Maintainers can create a proprietary version of their open-source JavaScript library, with additional features and support, and sell it to interested organizations. This can be a good way to generate revenue while still offering the open-source version for free.
Use a dual-licensing model: In this model, maintainers offer the open-source JavaScript library under a permissive license, but also offer a commercial license for a fee. This allows organizations to use the library for free if they comply with the terms of the open-source license, but they must pay for the commercial license if they want to use the library without complying with those terms.
Seek funding from organizations: Maintainers can seek funding from organizations that are interested in supporting the development and maintenance of the open-source JavaScript library. This can include companies that use the library, as well as foundations and other organizations that support open-source projects.
Accept donations: Maintainers can also accept donations from individuals and organizations who want to support the project. This can be done through a platform like GitHub or through a personal website.

Overall, the best option for monetizing an open-source JavaScript library will depend on the specific project and the needs and goals of the maintainers.

How to monetize open-source software

Jörg Rech — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 15:54:31 +0000

Are you a open-source maintainer looking to monetize your open-source software? If so, you're not alone. Many open-source maintainers struggle to generate revenue from their work, despite the valuable contributions they make to the open-source ecosystem.

But the good news is that it is possible to monetize open-source software, and there are several ways to do it. One approach is to charge a licensing fee for use of your library. This can be a flat fee, or you can offer different licensing options with varying prices. For example, you could offer a free license for personal or non-commercial use, and charge a fee for commercial use.

Another approach is to collect donations from users who want to support your work. This can be done through platforms like Patreon or OpenCollective, which allow users to make voluntary contributions. You can also offer paid support or consulting services to users who want help using or integrating your library. This can be a good way to generate revenue, and it can also help to build relationships with your users and gain valuable feedback on your library.

Additionally, you can sell related products or services that are connected to your library. For example, you could sell training courses, books, or developer tools that are based on your library. This can be a good way to generate additional revenue, and it can also help to increase the visibility and popularity of your library.

Finally, you can use a monetization platform like PayDevs. These platforms provide a closed registry of open-source libraries, and users pay a fee to access the registry. The fees are then distributed to the maintainers of the libraries, without charging any fees to the maintainers. This can be a convenient and effective way to monetize your library, as it allows you to focus on maintaining and improving your library, while the platform handles the payment processing and other aspects of monetization.

In conclusion, there are several ways to monetize your open-source software, and the right approach will depend on your specific goals and circumstances. By charging licensing fees, collecting donations, offering paid support or consulting services, selling related products or services, and using a monetization platform, you can generate revenue from your work and continue to support and improve your library. This can help to ensure the sustainability of the open-source ecosystem, and reward the hard work of maintainers

Top 5 GitHub initiatives regarding OSS monetization

Jörg Rech — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 10:09:49 +0000

Top 5 GitHub initiatives regarding OSS monetization and sustainable OSS from the GitHub Universe Event and before:

M12 Github Fund is a $10M seed fund for open source startups developing on GitHub’s platform managed by M12vc. The first startup funded is Codesee
Github Accelerator is a 10-week program to help developers work in open source full-time with an initial sponsorship as well as mentorship from open source leaders starting in Winter 2023. The Selection Committee includes Daniel Stenberg, Dr. Dawn Foster, Duane O'Brien, Erica Brescia, Ezra Olubi, Kailash Nadh, Mike Perham, and Viral Shah
Github Sponsors now lets you support your dependencies all at once by stating other maintainers receiving parts of the donations to your account
GitHub for Startups supports any early-stage Startup (OSS or not) by offering GitHub Enterprise free for 12 months.
Github sponsor-only repositories can only be used by sponsors on GitHub - enabling them early access or fast-tracked issues from sponsors.

What’s your opinion on these initiatives? Is it a good start? Is something missing? What would you propose?

And if you’re interested in more monetization news or our monetization approach for OSS follow us here at https://dev.to/paydevs

Is the Developer Economy around the corner?

Jörg Rech — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 08:58:45 +0000

The #CreatorEconomy with ~50 million creators after only 10 years is estimated at over $100 billion in 2022.

Today, we have approx. 27 million Software Developers worldwide growing with 1 million YoY. Not including Low-Code / No-Code developers, Data Scientists, and DevOps Engineers. Github even claims there are 91 million Open-Source developers.

When will a #DeveloperEconomy emerge for #DevTech, #DevTools, and #OpenSource with software creators as well as dev influencers - similar to the #CreatorEconomy?

What do you think?

Poll: Would you publish your package in a closed registry (e.g., not npmjs.com) to monetize your open-source library?

Jörg Rech — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 08:12:00 +0000

Dear OSS library maintainers:

Would you publish your package in a closed registry (e.g., not npmjs.com) to monetize your open-source library?

The sourcecode would still be open in GitHub etc. but the build/compiled package would be closed.

Please vote on:
Twitter and/or Reddit

State of OSS Monetization 2022 - Survey Results

Jörg Rech — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 17:05:06 +0000

In this article I share the results of the "State of OSS Monetization - Survey 2022" I conducted in March 2022. The survey was sent to nearly 10k authors of JavaScript packages in the NPM registry, of which 120 completed the survey and three were excluded as outliers. This article now presents the results of the 117 maintainers who responded.

Intro

Motivation for the survey

My goal with the survey was to get a better picture about the monetization of OSS to satisfy my own curiosity - specifically, how many maintainers really are interested in working part- or full-time for their projects, whether there is a desire to monetize their projects, and what payment would be sufficient to fund them.

Population of the survey

As mentioned earlier, the targeted population were maintainers of open-source software packages from the NPM registry which were contacted via email either using my own Gmail account and the email services Mailjet, EmailOctopus, and sendinblue using their free offers.

Technicalities

The survey itself was created using Google Forms and consisted of 16 questions that could be answered in about 5 minutes. The use of Google products was criticized for privacy concerns by four people who did not complete the survey.

The email asking to fill out the survey was sent between March 18th 2022 and March 31st 2022 to the email recipients. The survey recieves few answers in the beginning of April but was closed on April 5th 2022.

The Survey questions

The survey's 16 questions were divided into four parts, each presented on a web page:

P1: Context of the OSS project

Q1: “What is the name of your OSS project? (to handle duplicates, please use the handle on a registry - such as "react-native")
Q2: How many maintainers does your project have? (Average Number including you)
Q3: How many contributors does your project have? (Average Number excluding maintainers)

P2: Amount of work

Q4: How much time do you invest in programming your project? (Average hours per week)
Q5: How much time do you invest to manage your project or maintainers / contributors? (Average hours per week)
Q6: How much time do you invest to raise funds / monetize your project? (Average hours per week)

P3: Monetization status

Q7: Do you want to monetize your project?
Q8: Would you work full-time on your project, if you could find a stable monetization mechanism (i.e., get a full salary)?
Q9: How much money would you need to comfortably work full-time on your project? (please convert roughly in US-Dollar per month)
Q10: In which country do you live? (to give a context to your money need)
Q11: How do you currently (try to) monetize?

P4: Views on Monetization

Q12: What's stopping you from monetizing your OSS project? (if you are interested at all)
Q13: Would you accept corporate sponsorships that funds a full-time developer for your project?
Q14: How much of their Revenue (in Percent) should companies contribute to OSS?
Q15: Would you force companies to contribute money (e.g., via Dual Licenses) if it was easy for you?
Q16: Do you have any tips, comments, suggestions, or criticism about monetization or this survey?

The Survey Results

Results of part 1: Context of the OSS project

Since Q1 was only used to exclude duplicate responses for the same project and no duplicates were found, the responses to Q2 and Q3 are more revealing of the size of the projects and supervisors that responded.

The responses to Q2 and Q3 show that mainly projects with only one maintainer and few contributors answered. Only 21.4% had more than one maintainer on average. The total mean shows 1.33 maintainers per project with a median and mode of 1.
As for contributors, more than 53.4% have more than one contributor and 27.6% even have four or more contributors in their projects.

Results of part 2: Amount of work

The workload for developing and managing open source projects was the second part of the survey.
Responses to Q4 to Q6 show that 25% program between 4 to 16 hours a week while 7.7% even work more than 16 hours - bordering to a part-time job. On average the participants develop 4.46 hours per week with a median of 2 hours per week.

The time to manage a project and other maintainers as well as contributors requires more than 1 hour per week for 32.7% while 12.4% even need more than 4 hours a week. The total mean shows 1.7 hours per week to manage an open source project.

Finally, only 1.7% spend more than 1 hour to monetize their project - with an average of 0.13 hours per week.

Results of part 3: Monetization status

In the third part, I wanted to find out if maintainers are at all interested in monetizing their projects and what it would take to fully fund them to work on their projects full time.
The responses to Q7 and Q8 show that 41% want to monetize their projects, while 59% would rather not. However, only 41.9% prefer to work on their project in their spare time, while 24.8% would do so part-time and 33.3% full-time.

The minimum salary expectation was the focus of Q9 and Q10 and reflects the varying salaries around the world. From the 117 participants 14.5% would be OK with less than 2k USD per month while 23.1% expect more than 8k USD per month. The average salary expectation of reasonable salaries above zero and below 40k per month is 6.7k USD.

The final question of part 3, Q11 looks at current approaches to monetizing open source projects. While 42.7% have no plans to monetize their projects, 28.2% are interested but do not monetize yet. That leaves 23.9% of the participants who already utilize monetization approaches. The main approaches for monetization are donations (33.3%), sponsorship (14.5%), and paid support (13.7%).

Results of part 4: Views on Monetization

The last part 4 examined maintainers' views on the monetization of open source software.

When asked about the acceptance of corporate sponsorship, 57.3% tended to accept support from an entire software developer, while 26.5% would rather not accept corporate sponsorship.

Another question targeted the expectation of how much money companies should contribute to OSS based on their revenues. On average, participants thought it was appropriate for companies to contribute 3.81% of their revenue, with a median of 3% and a mode of 1%.

Finally, question Q15 was intended to be polarizing and asked whether companies should be forced to donate money. While 58.1% of respondents answered no, almost a quarter (23.1%) leaned toward yes.

Please note that question Q16 was a comment field and was not evaluated - as was question Q12, which was too complicated to present in any meaningful way (but feel free to evaluate the data in the Github repository).

Conclusion and Interpretation

While fewer maintainers answered than I hoped for and the survey is in no means representative, my takeaway is that many maintainers (40%) want to monetize their projects and could decide it on their own (most projects have very few maintainers). If monetization would work it should yield an income of about 6.6k USD per month or 80k USD per year to enable the maintainers to work part-time (25%) or full-time (33%) on their projects. Furthermore, almost a quarter of the maintainers (23%) would even agree to force/pressure companies to dedicate 3% of their revenue to open source projects.

If you want to make your own analysis you can find the anonymized data in the following repository:

https://github.com/joergrech/State-of-OSS-Monetization-Survey-2022

If you want to stay informed about further explorations and approaches to find a satisfying solution for the Monetization of OSS you can follow my ideas here:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paydevs_com
Github: https://github.com/paydevs
Newsletter about OSS Monetization: https://paydevs.us14.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3876337cbc511e151f1c346d2&id=25a91d4e2b (for longer articles or infos)

Survey about Monetization of OSS Libraries

Jörg Rech — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 16:43:07 +0000

Hi OSS Developers,
I hope that you can help me understand the state of OSS Monetization better. I’m interested if and how you monetize - or try to monetize - your projects.

To get a better picture of the current state of OSS monetization I’ve set-up a quick survey to evaluate different monetization approaches and what OSS developers would require to work full- or part-time on their OSS projects.

The survey with 16 questions will take about 5 minutes and is aimed at OSS developers / maintainers:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegX_yKiGtXamKrVfg_1ioVWZ3Xdvtc3usZYn7p20dysHiaGQ/viewform

Best regards,
Joerg

PS: if you want to get the Survey Results you can join an email list at: https://mailchi.mp/8e59bb1c13db/state-of-oss-monetization