r/opensource • u/brainland • 5d ago
Discussion If your business makes money from open source, should you give back?
I have always had this thought that if your software or business makes money while leveraging open source, I think it's a great culture to dedicate a portion of your earnings to supporting the maintainers behind those projects.
Think about it. Many businesses rely on open-source libraries, frameworks, and tools to build products, save time, and reduce development costs. Some even build entire businesses around them.
Yet, the people maintaining these projects are often doing so with limited funding, in their spare time, or alongside other jobs. Meanwhile, businesses can generate real revenue from the work these maintainers make available to everyone.
I believe that when your business starts making money from these tools, giving something back should be part of the culture. It doesn't have to be a huge amount. It could be a percentage of your revenue, regular donations, sponsoring a maintainer, or even paying for work that helps keep a project healthy.
Of course, open source doesn't mean you owe every project money, and not every business can afford to contribute financially. Contributions can also come through code, documentation, bug reports, and helping other users.
But if a business can afford to give back, why shouldn't it?
We all want open-source projects to remain available, secure, and actively maintained. Supporting the people behind them is one way to help make that happen.
I believe we are all aware of all the recent vulnerabilities reported lately across various domains and this should be a signal.
So, if your business makes money using open source, don't you think giving back should be part of your responsibilities, or should it remain entirely optional?
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u/stealthagents 1d ago
Totally agree. It feels pretty hypocritical when companies profit off open source but don’t give back. Even small contributions can make a big difference for maintainers who are often underappreciated and overworked. It’s all about creating a sustainable ecosystem, right?
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u/SlightlyMotivated69 4d ago
Look at the AI labs:
They built their models using opens source software and and open source information, often illegaly obtained.
Now they are selling the knowledge back to society while making no show about the fact that unemploying the people that assembled the information used to train their model is their main selling point for their customer businesses.
All that while forbidding similar "open source" practices against themselfes, like competitors destilling their models.
Their LLMs should get expropriated. They can charge for the cost of running the models.
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u/RossPeili 4d ago
It sounds practical, but true open source comes with MIT or relevant licenses that do not oblige that. On the other hand, licenses that protect your open source project like AGPL, are automatically filtered out and banned by 99% of enterprises using open source frameworks. Worst case scenario, they will fork your work, rework it and pretend it was build internallly.
There are many ways around this, it all boils down on the kind of framework and its complexity, the kind of clients / users using it, and how paranoid you are. We had a similar internal 2 month conversation in our project (MIT backed), to make it AGPL, or Apache, but decided to stay MIT because = more adoption, no questions asked. Then the upside comes from how complex your system is. If companies rely on it, and then need customizations, or enhancements, they usually come directly at you and will pay you to do the work, cause who knows better the framework that those that built it?
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u/kincaidDev 4d ago
Companies will also pretend to interview you for jobs and ask questions about your project so they don’t have to pay you
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u/colonelsmoothie 4d ago
I don't think you should feel obligated, but if you're a serious user of an open source project, you'll probably run into its limitations at some point (bugs, need new features, etc.). Once you do, you'll wind up contributing out of necessity.
I have been building software that uses a moderately popular library as a dependency. I started finding bugs and fixing them, and then gradually worked my way up to becoming one of its maintainers.
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u/XNo_Notes 4d ago
Pleading to hearts inside a system that actively rewards ripping them out is kind of funny.
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u/FarToe1 4d ago
Morally, I agree.
To the point where I recently went to my bosses and asked them to put aside part of the budget for a foss donation fund. I'm delighted that they agreed, and we've identified a number of smallish projects to donate to.
We have saved a lot of money by switching from expensive commercial software to foss (usually when the former started ramping up prices or made business decisions we disagreed with - Kayako and Atlassian for pushing us to cloud-only, PRTG for ridiculous price increases, Vmware for the obvious reason). All of these have been, or about to be, replaced by free alternatives. That's a financial language that every C-level can understand.
So yes, morally.
But if that decision was mandatory, I'd swing hard against it. Those decisions we made were to FOSS software that were fully free, or had free tiers that filled our needs. When important features such as SSO on FOSS software are locked behind freemium or feature licences, my support for them evaporates very quickly.
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u/philpirj 4d ago
Unpopular opinion.
I didn’t add myself to the list of beneficiaries of a popular open-source project, as I thought that if I measure the effort spent and those monetary contributions with my regular pay rate, this knowledge would plummet my motivation to continue maintaining it.
It is a voluntary duty. For the benefit of the public.
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u/FistyFisticuffs 1d ago
I don't write code for its own sake and pretty much all of the code I've released or made fixes to are also for my own benefit anyway. The only thing that stops all of my code being in the public domain everywhere is simply the fact that some countries don't recognize the same concept of public domain which forces me to fall back on the most permissive license available if that is the case. I have a terminal degree in another field and I learned how to write code literally by looking at other people's work and tinker with it and reading documentation until I could create things anew and I wouldn't put out anything that someone has a better version already out anyway. Code is ultimately just tools to an end and it's all intentional and be my guest if you can improve on it. I maintain projects to the extent that I need to use it and that could be from 50-100 lines for a couple of years to something slightly more substantial for nearly a decade. I don't know how most people use my code and frankly, it's not my concern when they are free to fork it and make it their own. That's kind of the point, isn't it? I try to follow best practices but ultimately it is still just my take at solving a particular problem and I own neither the problem nor the sole solution. I know that someone used my code and their credentials and raised a fair bit of VC with their startup that is overselling what's necessary or possible and if someone wants to invest without doing their homework, well, caveat emptor. My snake oil will always be free, in both senses, and no snakes will actually be harmed.
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u/ShaneCurcuru 4d ago
It's complicated. But yes, companies in the software realm should give back - but the practical question is: how, exactly? And more importantly: how do you make the business case to company leadership to convince them to follow through?
See also: Open Source Sustainability and related topics; there's a fair amount of work and advocacy out there. There are also plenty of open source projects that are being built by software company employees working their dayjobs as committers - either obviously, or non-obviously at a FOSS Foundation that provides some level of governance over the project.
More reading for the curious: https://fosssustainability.com/
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u/Independent_Ad7172 3d ago
If a business does give money, I'd aim it at the few dependencies it couldn't easily replace, and make it recurring rather than a one-off. Even a small amount helps more when maintainers can count on it.
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u/sumguypookie 2d ago
I don't make money from open source software. But if I use it for more than 90 days, I make a donation or "buy" a version if one is available.
If nothing else, it's my way of saying, I appreciate the work you put in to make this.
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u/Anonymity6584 20h ago
yes. If you make profit then least you can do is support developer of project or something... Not because some lisence might say so but basic human decency of not exploiting other people ruthlesly.
There picture of this old joke now where this huge structure of corporate services stand on small block thats maintained some fellow somewhere as opensource project. remove that small block and its all coming down ..
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u/ChristianKl 4d ago
Most of the big companies do give back to OpenSource. Sometimes people even complain about it. Anthropic for example gave Blender a larger donation to work on their MCP server and plenty of people on Reddit were unhappy about that and so instead of Anthropic providing long-term support for blender it was just a one-time donation.
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u/tdammers 5d ago
But if a business can afford to give back, why shouldn't it?
Because that's not how for-profit businesses work.
By all means contribute to the open source code your business uses, but do it because it benefits your business, not because it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside or because you pity the poor souls who slave away at all that unpaid labor.
The labor that goes into open source software is not a donation; it's an investment.
To understand this, think about how software can be valuable - just like anything else that is valuable, it gets its value from being useful to someone in some situation. But unlike physical goods, software is not naturally scarce: you can copy and reuse it at practically no cost, and without any real limits. Once it exists, making more of it is trivial, and using it does not consume it in any way. An apple you eat ceases to exist; a program you run a million times is still the exact program.
This means that while the value of most goods and services is directly tied to something physical, and decreases with use, the value of software is only tied to the existence of and access to the information it consists of.
From a business perspective, this means that software cannot be traded like physical goods and services - you cannot really "sell" a program, because there is no value in a copy that is trivial to make and transfer, and whose value does not depend on the physical existence of a specific copy. You can, however, benefit from it (as a business) in two ways: either the software solves a problem you have (in which case its existence and your access to it is where the value lies for you), or it solves a problem someone else has, and that someone else is going to do something that benefits you for it.
The most widely known profit model for software development, restrictive licensing, uses the "access to" part of the value equation of software: you build something that solves a problem many people have, and then you make them pay for the right to use the software within certain limitations - i.e., you sell them licenses. That works, but it has lots of issues, such as the fact that unlike physical goods, software can still be copied and reused effortlessly, and the only thing that prevents this is a legal framework that makes it illegal (which is not the same as physically impossible).
Another profit model is custom-built software. Here, you build software for a purpose that is so specific that copying and reusing it is unlikely to happen - you build it for a specific customer, and that customer pays you for the entire development effort. Since the software has no utility to anyone else, and doesn't solve any other problems than the one at hand, nobody else is going to want to buy it again anyway, so its existence is not a threat to the future of your business, and you can just grant the customer very permissive rights, or even sign over all the rights entirely.
The third profit model is where the existence of the software is somehow beneficial to your actual business. E.g., if you sell things online, then the existence of a good ecommerce platform (that you have access to) benefits your business, because, well, without one you have no business to begin with; and that value does not depend on how many others have access to the same software. You now have three options:
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Pay for a license for some existing ecommerce platform
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Develop an ecommerce platform yourself (or pay someone to do it for you) and keep it to yourself
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Develop an ecommerce platform yourself and share it freely
Option 1 is guaranteed to cost you money, and gives you little control over the thing - the software is what it is, you can either pay for it or walk away, but you don't get any real say in its development.
Option 2 is guaranteed to cost you money, and almost certainly more than option 1, and also requires some active policing to enforce your exclusive access. But at least you get full control over the development.
Option 3 also costs you money, but you don't need to spend any effort on policing, and there's a good chance others who also benefit from its existence will make their own changes and share them freely, allowing you to pull them in and use them for free. In other words, while you may still need to invest a good amount of work upfront, you will not be funding the entire development forever - if all goes well, most of the ongoing work will be funded collectively by all the high-stakes users (those for whom the software is important enough to invest into actively contributing to it). It may still cost you more than option 1, but that may well be worth it, because you still get full control over the development (after all, none of the contributions you receive are forced on you, you can always reject them).
So basically option 3, open source, is a calculated gamble - pay a bit more upfront, but benefit in the long run by attracting free labor while still keeping full control.
Almost all widely used open source software is effectively built and maintained this way. Virtually nobody makes open source software because they are desperate to make the world a better place, even if it means slaving away in a basement doing unpaid development work for decades. Those who don't do it for profit gain something else from it, or at least they hope to: enjoyment, meeting their own software needs, fame, fake internet points, a portfolio for their resume, networking opportunities that might turn into job opportunities, improving their programming skills, trying out ideas in a low-stakes environment, etc. True unencumbered altruism is practically never the motivation; open source is, by and large, a selfish thing.
So, with that said; don't invest into open source because "it's the right thing to do" or "because you can afford it" or "because using the software without paying for it is unethical" (it's not, the developer explicitly allowed you to, it's not unethical to take them up on that). Do it because it's good business, a worthwhile investment.
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u/tldev_de 5d ago
Fully agree. At server.camp we host open source software, so our business runs directly on the work of maintainers. That's why we give 10% back to the community. For us that's not charity, it's part of running a sustainable business. If the projects we depend on aren't healthy, neither are we.