Today GitHub launched Sponsors, joining OpenCollective and Patreon as platforms that open source developers use to accept donations. Though sending and receiving donations feels good, charity is fundamentally an ineffective way to fund open source.
Most donations to open source always have come from those who care about the community and understand the lack of funding, mostly other open source developers. The businesses who reap most of the benefits of open source will never donate substantial amounts just to reward the creators, they need to get something in return.
What can projects offer?
The most valuable thing open source projects have to offer is hyper-specialized expertise. Technical support from open source teams can save businesses valuable engineering-hours and make purchasing expensive support plans a practical business decision.
Because manually keeping track of support tickets, subscriptions, and support teams is a hassle, I started Otechie to make it easy for open source projects to sell and manage technical support plans. So far, we have been beta testing with the Nuxt.js core team https://otechie.com/nuxt and they have already made thousands selling technical support. Otechie hopes to raise the bar from making open source simply sustainable to making open source a viable career.
If you're interested in Otechie you can apply to the beta test at https://otechie.com or feel free to email me any questions at dylan@otechie.com
Thanks!
Dylan
Top comments (2)
Great idea. People forgot some of the biggest companies are basically selling tech support for open source products
I see most of the "BIG" projects in open source actually are having a big company behind. And coming to smaller projects, this Otechie surely is one of the ways.