How to pay your rent with your open source project
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
Top comments
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…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
HN stats
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 672
- Total comments
- 458
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-06-18 | How to pay your rent with your open source project | markosaric | 4 | 0 |
| 2020-06-19 | How to pay your rent with your open source project | ukutaht | 3 | 0 |
| 2020-07-27 | How to pay your rent with your open source projectFirst breakout · Best thread | markosaric | 342 | 168 |
| 2022-08-24 | How to pay your rent with your open source project (2020)Latest 20+ point return | gregnavis | 321 | 289 |
| 2026-07-28 | How to pay your rent with your open source project (2020)Hall induction | downbad_ | 2 | 1 |