Funding OSS

HashiCorp changed Terraform's license from open to BSL - and the community forked the project within 24 hours, creating OpenTofu. Why does this happen? How do OSS projects get funded, and what goes wrong?

• Evan You (Vue.js) earns $170,000+/year through GitHub Sponsors - one of the rare few who can work on OSS full-time
• webpack receives $40,000+/year via Open Collective - pays maintainers an hourly rate for specific tasks
• Sovereign Tech Fund (Germany) funded curl for $150,000 - curl runs on essentially every internet-connected device
• OpenSSL received critical funding only after Heartbleed 2014 - until the vulnerability went public, the budget was $2,000/year

Monetization models: dual licensing and open core

**The sustainability problem:** most OSS projects are held together by a handful of burned-out maintainers working for free. When that breaks down - projects get abandoned, or worse, relicensed. There are a few sustainable models.

**OpenTofu vs Terraform:** when HashiCorp changed the license, the Linux Foundation created the OpenTofu fork in 24 hours. This shows the power of communities: if a project is important enough, a license conflict equals a fork. That's why relicensing is such a radical move.

Direct funding: Sponsors, Open Collective, Tidelift

Direct funding is when users and companies pay maintainers directly. Several platforms make this easier.

**Vue.js real numbers:** Evan You earns ~$170,000/year via Patreon + GitHub Sponsors and works on Vue full-time. This is the exception - most popular projects (Babel, webpack) receive $20,000–50,000/year split across several maintainers.

Corporate sponsorship and grants

The largest OSS projects are funded by corporations - not out of altruism, but because depending on unmaintained code creates business risk. Google, Meta, and Microsoft pay full-time engineers to work on OSS.

**Corporate control is a risk:** when a company funds a project with full-time engineers, it gains influence over the roadmap. Node.js was forked as io.js in 2014 due to conflict with Joyent. Kubernetes moved to CNCF to reduce Google's dominance. A neutral foundation lowers this risk.

Key takeaways

• Dual licensing: free under AGPL, paid under commercial - protection from AWS-style adoption without contribution
• Open core: base functionality is OSS, enterprise features are paid - GitLab, Elasticsearch
• License changes risk forks: OpenTofu, OpenSearch - communities fork within 24 hours
• GitHub Sponsors for individuals, Open Collective for projects with transparent finances
• CNCF/Apache foundation provides neutral governance - AWS and Azure are willing to contribute

Related topics

Funding is tightly coupled to licenses - the choice of license determines the monetization model.

• Next lesson: Licenses, CLA and Compatibility — Licenses are the foundation of any OSS monetization strategy

Вопросы для размышления

• You created an open source database. AWS starts selling a managed version and earns more from your code than you do. Which license would you choose - and what are the risks of each option?
• Babel is critical infrastructure for millions of projects, yet historically received $20,000/year. Why don't companies pay for dependencies they use every single day?

Связанные уроки

• se-01