How to make money from Open Source

We have collection of more than 1 Million open source products ranging from Enterprise product to small libraries in all platforms. We aggregate information from all open source repositories. Search and find the best for your needs. Check out projects section.

How to make money from Open Source

We aggregate and tag open source projects. We have collections of more than one million projects. Check out the projects section.

As open source getting popular day by day, many have questions like How to make money from Open Source? Lot more products are getting introduced and don't know who is making money. Certainly open source means, give the product and source for free then how to make money? Yes sell the product for free but get paid for its services.

Beta Testing / Code Contribution: If you are the owner of the product then you could get beta testing and code contributions for free or for some minimal pay. If you are a contributor, Pick the right product and work for them. You may get paid.

Donation: Most open source products will have a link for donation. This is starting point. Few make really good money on this. They even list the people names who have donated. They will also send some receipt to get tax exemptions.

Sponsor: Most of the open source products do have some sponsors. They would have mentioned the list of sponsors on the right side of the page. If you get some sponsor then it would help you to grow faster. They would invest in your product.

Enterprise Edition: Most of the open source products has dual licensing support, open source edition and Professional or Enterprise edition. If you are able to sell Enterprise edition then this would bring more money and this will make your organization to grow. Enterprise edition do have 24/7 support services.

Training and Consulting: Few do training and consulting by themselves. Take Lucid Imagination, they do consulting on search engine products Lucene and Solr. Sliverstripe Open Source CMS provides loads of other services like hosting, integration etc. Most of the products cannot be used as it is. They require some extra development or modification to suit your needs. Google will throw huge list of results for Drupal and Joomla consulting firms. You may not be the owner of the product but you could provide training and consulting.

Sell Add-ons: Give the base product for free and sell add-on modules. Check out Snowcovered, they sell DotNetNuke add-ons. Add-on module will bring good money.

At last its not easy to make money from Open Source. You require clear focus about the product. Don't jump in just to make money there are other stuffs available.

Findbestopensource Editorial Team

We publish blog post about open source products. If you are interested in sharing knowledge about open source products, please visit write for us

Subscribe to our newsletter.

We will send mail once in a week about latest updates on open source tools and technologies. subscribe our newsletter

How to get sponsors for your open source projects

Open source projects are free to use but the developers should be economically happy so that they could give time and energy to the project. There are lot of projects which are good but not able to sustain in the long run. In this article we will discuss about how to get sponsors for open source projects.

Benefits in contributing to Open Source

What the benefit will i get, if i contribute to Open Source? This is the frequently asked question by many people. I just want to pen down the benefits which i know and i hope you will agree with it.

Open-Source Software Projects - Typical Common Reasons for Failure

Failure is often the catalyst for success. You need to make mistakes to truly learn and grow as a tech worker. Sometimes, you don’t need to make the mistakes to learn. Learning from other’s mistakes can be just as informative and productive. Paying attention to what others have done can help you avoid the same kind of failure. Here are a few common mistakes that authors make that lead to the failure of open-source software projects.

How Bitcoin works? A simple introduction.

Bitcoin is an open source digital currency which could be transferred in a P2P payment network. It is decentralized and it is not controlled by any central authority or banks. It is transferred from person to person and no authority will be aware of your transaction. Its quite different from PayPal or Banks.

How to contribute to open source

I could see many many students posting this question in many forums, I want to contribute to open source but How to contribute? There are many ways to do that. I have listed a few and I hope it might be useful.

Getting started with Apache OpenNLP

The Apache OpenNLP library is a machine learning based toolkit for the processing of natural language text. OpenNLP also includes entropy and perceptron based machine learning. . It contains several components for natural language processing pipeline like sentence detector, tokenizer, name finder, document categorizer, part-of-speech tagger, chunker, parser, co-reference resolution.

10 sites to get the large data set or data corpus for free

You may require GBs of data to do performance or load testing. How your app behaves when there is loads of data. You need to know the capacity of your application. This is the frequently asked question from the sales team "The customer is having 100GB of data and he wants to know whether our product will handle this? If so how much RAM / Disk storage required?". This article has pointers to the large data corpus.

How hashmap works in Java. My style of learning.

This is the most frequently asked questions in the interview. Googling will throw many links related to this topic. How to learn the implementation of hash map? My style of learning using open source learning technique.

Crowdfunding for Open Source Projects

Open Source projects requires sponsors to fund their project. Few got good funding but few others are struggling to continue their project. A contributor, who does full time work in open source project requires funding to take care his needs. He has to be paid and he cannot do it for free. For those who don't get fund, check out this crowdfunding sites, these are exclusively for open source projects. Join these, get some fund and continue your dream.

React JS Developer Salary Overview

These days, web development is a need for any business - it attracts huge investments and can kick-start businesses. As for the tools mainly used for development, JavaScript is riding the wave right now. StackOverflow has been naming it the most popular programming language for six years straight. React, as one of the most popular JS libraries is also the first choice for interface developers. It offers some of the best web development tools for mobile and single-page applications.

Why Experienced Programmers Should Contribute to Open Source

People who have taken programming as their career has to do coding for almost 30 years. Will they always get an opportunity to do complex tasks or to write project from scratch? The answer is NO. Sometimes they may get but not always. What should they do?

Marketing stratigies required to sell open source product

Many new products are coming in the open source world. Few are forking existing project, adding new features to it and selling it as open source product. Few strategies required to follow to sell the product better.

Why Corporates should contribute to open source?

Open source is leading innovation in all technological areas. Open source awareness has spread around the world. Schools and Colleges students speak about it. Government organization think about it. Corporates relay on open source technological stack to build their enterprise or cloud products.

All About Multi-Provider Feature of Angular Version 2.0

The newly introduced concept of dependency injection in Angular version 2.0 makes it an attractive front-end technology all because of one amazing feature called 'Multi-Providers'. In general, it allows the users to attach certain operations by themselves and a few plugin custom functionality which is not required in our mobile app use case.

Advanced Programming Guide in Redis using Jedis

Redis is an in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes with radius queries and streams. This blog covers the advanced concepts like cluster, publish and subscribe, pipeling concepts of Redis using Jedis Java library.

Angular Service Workers Usage Guide

Web developers come across scenarios like web application completely breaks when workstation goes offline. Likewise to get into our application, every time we need to open a browser and then access it. Instead if it is in app, it will be easy to access for end-user. Push notifications similar to email client need to be done through web application. All these are addressed by a magic called service worker.

React Patent Clause Licensing issue. Is it something to worry?

React libraries from Facebook is one of the most used UI libraries. It is competitive to AngularJS. There are many open source UI components or frameworks available but mostly people narrow down to two choices Angular / React. Recently Facebook has updated React license and added a patent clause which makes companies to worry and rethink whether to use React or not.

Is it good time to switch from MySQL and choose some other database?

Recently you might have seen many news that big organization like Redhat, Fedora, Wikipedia switched their database from MySQL. Now Google also going to join them. Why everyone want to move out of MySQL? It is once a popular and stable software. What is the reason behind and what are the possible alternatives.

LetsEncrypt certificate using ZeroSSL tools

Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority. It uses ACME protocol to validate your domain. If you have complete control over your domain, you can get a certificate for free. In order to provide secure access to your public network like HTTPS, LDAPS etc you need a certificate from a Certificate Authority. The cost of the certificate range from 10$ to 100$. If you want a wildcard certificate then it may cost more. The certificate is valid for one year and you need to pay and renew every year. Let's Encrypt comes for the rescue. You can create and renew certificate for few.

Read and Write PDF using OpenPDF

OpenPDF is based on a fork of iText version 4. iText is a widely used PDF library but they changed their license and moved to AGPL. In this article, we can see how to read and write to PDF, How to extract text from PDF and How to create password protected PDF.