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?

  • slazer2auEnglish
    16•16 days ago

    depends on the project. Some projects are spun out from major corporations. Others are one dude making a thing and it gets used everywhere and taken over by venture capital firms.

    Some projects will have sponsorship, there are also government grants they can get, but I would say most comes from regular users doing reoccurring dontations.

    • oce 🐆
      3•16 days ago

      Some projects are spun out from major corporations.

      This is most of the FOSS projects in data engineering and data science. They come from tech giants or some dudes who just left tech giants to create a FOSS tool with a paid managed version, and those may get bough back by other tech giants later.

      Example:

      Analytics and AI giant Databricks reportedly paid nearly $2 billion when it acquired Tabular in June, a startup that was only doing $1 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Bloomberg. That’s a pretty outrageous exit multiple, and it was purportedly fueled by a battle between Databricks and Snowflake.

      Tabular had over $30 million in funding, backed by Altimeter Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Zetta Venture Partners, when it was acquired just three years after it was founded. Tabular’s valuation was tied to Apache Iceberg, a popular open source table format that the startup’s founders created while at Netflix. The startup quickly became an expensive pawn in the war between Databricks and Snowflake.https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/14/databricks-reportedly-paid-2-billion-in-tabular-acquisition/