Problem: You want to make money for all the work you do your open-source project. But no one pays for it.
Reason: Developers choose your project, and developers are at the bottom of the food chain. They have no authority to spend money, usually, or they get pushback and delays if they do.
Solution: Band together with the authors of related projects and create a new closed-source product, taking bits of your various codebases. For instance, what if Faker.js and other similar libraries banded together into a corporation, and sold a multi-language mocking/stubbing/faking toolset? It would be easier to go to your boss, show them the product, and convince them to pay for it, since it now encompasses multiple things your dev team needs.
>For instance, what if Faker.js and other similar libraries banded together into a corporation, and sold a multi-language mocking/stubbing/faking toolset?
Nobody would use them. Ultimately they would lose out to someone like Thoughtbot that puts out open source tools as a loss leader to drive consulting business.
That only works if Thoughbot's open source tools are good enough. People seem very happy to pay for JetBrain's suite of tools. Postman's collaborative offering makes good money. Sublime is still doing well.
There are people still selling standalone pieces of software to developers and doing okay. It's hard to compete with huge companies with a build-over-buy culture but that's just their nature. It's way cheaper to just built it themselves and have control of the project than to pay the licensing fees.
Tools are an easier sell. You can always switch to a different one without too much fuss. That's a lot different than writing five years worth of test cases and then having to go for a license renewal.
Reason: Developers choose your project, and developers are at the bottom of the food chain. They have no authority to spend money, usually, or they get pushback and delays if they do.
Solution: Band together with the authors of related projects and create a new closed-source product, taking bits of your various codebases. For instance, what if Faker.js and other similar libraries banded together into a corporation, and sold a multi-language mocking/stubbing/faking toolset? It would be easier to go to your boss, show them the product, and convince them to pay for it, since it now encompasses multiple things your dev team needs.