1 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

Monetizing Your Open Source Project(Without Being Evil)

Adam DavisonAlbert Santoni

Mixxx Development Team25/10/08

2 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

Introduction A lot of small open source projects are poor GSoC showed us (and presumably many others)

how much difference some money can make But how can you go about monetizing your

project? And is monetizing even a real word anyway??!

3 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

Without being evil… Generally by not evil, we mean we want to

continue to offer software which is “free” Although you can insert your own definition of

“free” here I guess…

4 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

Who Are We? Some guys We work on Mixxx, a digital DJ application Cross-platform, desktop, audio software

5 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

The “Traditional” Model In so far as such a thing exists in open source It has been giving away your software and selling

support, customisation and other similar services For example Red Hat, Asterisk/Digium and other

“solution” type providers This works well if you have corporate customers But doesn’t necessarily translate well for apps

targeted at individual users

6 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

Tiered Versions Some projects attempt to produce two releases, a

free open source one and a premium/enterprise type release which you can charge for

MySQL, Sugar CRM Qt is slightly different Again works best if you have corporate

customers Perhaps creates a risk of alienating some of your

developers and users? Possible licensing issues for some projects

7 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

What Else Is There? xchat – IRC client

− Charges for official Windows binaries− Many unofficial builds around...− Is this profitable?

Ardour – Digital Audio Workstation− Requests subscriptions/donations− Seems to bring in ~1500USD a month− DAW is fairly high value software/professional users

8 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

What Else Is There? Rhythmbox – Audio Player

− Links to music stores for seamless content purchases− Presumably making commission on sales?

Firefox – Web Browser − Onwards…

9 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

10 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

11 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

This doesn’t translate to every application though…

12 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

For Us? We’re only just getting involved in this game Support/services don’t really work for us Perhaps rebranding for radio, hardware sales… Providing content could work for us Currently running trials of bundling free tracks

with downloads of Mixxx

13 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

Where Are We As A Community? Lots of interesting ideas out there Things have certainly advanced a lot in the last 5

years or so Firefox especially stands out as an example of

how you can develop a high quality application and get it paid for while providing the user a useful service

Outlook seems good

14 Adam Davison and Albert Santoni - GSoC Mentor Summit - 25/10/08

Discussion! Want to hear lots of stuff from everybody Have you tried some of these things in the past?

− How well did it work? Why? Do you have any new ideas? How have projects changed to deal with having

money to spend? Where do you draw the line on being “free”?