XSF Discussion - 2022-09-20

fwiw, openfire (the server) may be monetized, but spark (the client) development is not (as far as I am aware)

flow: but someone is paid to work on it right?

Err, neither are, but there is a good amount of people willing to pay to get certain modifications applied to the OSS project.

(why does my nickname keep changing here?)

So, both Openfire and Spark are open source, and get contributions from unpaid community members, including me. There are a number of people and organizations that want features added to the project (mostly Openfire, not so much Spark), and are willing to pay for that. I'm not sure if that makes Openfire 'monitized' in that definition. I prefer to see it as an OSS project with a healthy ecosystem.

I'm making close to 100% of my income from it, either by adding stuff to Openfire directly, or by working on proprietary, derived projects. By far most of my customers want me to put all generic / general-use improvements to the upstream project, instead of keeping that proprietary. Saves them the trouble of having to maintain a fork.

Guus: ah awesome, and thanks for clarifying

no problem

want a feature built in to Openfire? I know a guy. ;)

What worked unexpectedly well was adding a landing page on our website, for people (organisations) that are looking to pay for support or features. We have a section of 'professional service providers', that seems to get regular use. I can't speak for others on that page, by I regularly get contacted through that page. It also makes for a nice reference when people ask for features to be developed that really aren't of much use for the generic project. "Maybe ask one of our professional service providers, if this is important enough for you to spend money on."

It's not like I'm getting daily emails through that, but if once in a few months, a customer comes in through that with an opportunity that makes for a couple of weeks of paid work - that's pretty ideal.

Guus, thanks for sharing :)

it's all a bit of a balancing act, but so far, it seems to work for me.

(and hopefully others)

no problem. I'm mostly sharing in the hopes that this helps other projects be more economically viable, using examples like these.

I'm a firm believer that for the ecosystem to truly succeed, money must be made, so that developers can feed their family from the work that they'd otherwise volunteer for (but might not be able to get to, because day-job).

There are probably a bunch of other approaches that work equally well, or better - but this seems to work for me.

+1

That worked well for me for... a long time. But it can get stressful, and I had things I wanted to work on that customers were less likely to request. Hence taking a chance on Snikket, and the recent NGI funded projects - trying to achieve some of the goals for Prosody and the ecosystem that I have more interest in seeing happen.

Whether this falls under the "monetized" distinction of the original question, I don't know

Yeah, I found the same - both on the stressful bit, as well as not being able to prioritize your own preferred tasks. I'm generally working for a couple of projects at the same time, which can increase the first, but lower the latter (as there's always something 'more fun' than something else).

>Guus : (and hopefully others) As Guus has pointed out, It is a community effort. We pass on professional opportunities between each other and sometimes work together on resulting projects depending on skills and experience. I am currently on a semi-long-term contract job from one of those opportunities.

I keep working on Pade (both openfire plugin and converse client) because of 3 main reasons. 1. I use the source code in my day job 2. There are a few thousand real life users out there that depend on it. 3. It is a template for how to integrate into Jitsi, Converse and Openfire and a few plugin developers use it for reference

MattJ: I think snikket will count as monetized once you start charging for the hosting. But the Android client is a conversations fork so not sure if it counts as "other than conversations". If so my fork is monetized too

Very good resource for when you wonder "in what ways are md5 and sha1 utterly broken again?' https://github.com/corkami/collisions

meanwhile git still doesn't fully support sha2 hashes

I think you can make new sha2 git repos now?

moparisthebest: and can't push them anywhere iirc

and the man page states that the format is subject to incompatible changes

Ah nice I didn't know that