Rui Ueyama, creator of the mold linker open source tool, talks about his experience in launching his own open source software business. While he was successful in making mold linker a popular open source software, he struggled to monetize it in a way that gave him a big return. Ueyama shares four ways to monetize open source software: GitHub sponsor, buying support, contracts for developing new features, and selling the entire project. However, he found that each approach had its own challenges, such as not much interest in buying support contracts, difficulty in getting large profits from GitHub sponsors, and the psychological burden of constantly asking for donations from sponsors. Ultimately, Ueyama suggests that if one’s number one aim is to have big success economically, then open source is not the way to do it.
https://gist.github.com/lleyton/9c0b75d065f37333ea9851b6cad1d1e6