Forgive me but this part of the open source and foss confuses me. If you code and release an open source and free piece of software like say, a robust video player such as VLC, how is that dev being paid?

Because in my eyes (I’m not too privy to FOSS ins and outs)

I’m basically getting your software for free of no charge, it IS free as in free beer cos you’re not asking ME to pay it for so who is paying YOU?

Does it come via donations or wealthy corporations like Red Hat and Microsoft pay or fund open sourced projects that is given to the hard working developers of that OSS/FOSS project?

  • WolfLink
    7·
    3 months ago

    Ways open source projects get paid for:

    • people do it as a hobby and don’t get paid
    • people rely on donations
    • government funded software projects are usually open source
    • software created in an academic setting is usually released as open source (this often overlaps with government funding, but not always). Many important open source projects started in academia. Many open source licenses were initially written by academia for those projects (BSD was created by UC Berkeley, and the MIT license was created by MIT).
    • Sometimes companies have a business model that doesn’t involve selling software, and they don’t really benefit from having that software be proprietary. They may open source their software because it gets other people to use it, and by extension gets people to buy their paid products. For example, there are some free, open source software projects by Nvidia, but you would need to buy one of their graphics cards to take advantage of it.
    • Dual licensing. One strategy is to release your code as open source but under a copyleft license so it isn’t business-friendly. When a business wants to use it, they pay for a proprietary-licensed copy instead of using the open source copyleft version.