How to pay your rent with your open source project

Most of the people writing OSS do it for fun/side project/to solve a problem, not for the money. Problems come if that peace of software gets popular, they get a lot of bug reports, improvement suggestions/requests, emails, noise in general. And a person who wrote the software has a full time job, so the time available for OSS is limited. That person is probably well paid in it's current job, so the OSS has a long way to go in…

There is one important monetization strategy that is overlooked by this article: dual licensing. License the source explicitly for non commercial use only, then offer a commercial use licensed product (plus support, usually) for a fee. If there is a big community of hobbyists in the relevant field who do the same thing in their dayjob, I think this works well. Edit: A more open source version of this is to GPL the source and offer a more commercial friendly…