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The silent uprise of “paid open-source”
Some open-source projects struggle to find sponsors, while others force the companies to pay for using them. This slight difference in the funding approaches makes day & night difference to the amount of money open-source developers make — and now it’s on a rise.
What is “paid open-source“ anyways?
Numerous open-source libraries today make use of GPLv3 license for their projects and offer a commercial license at a price. GPLv3 is a software license that prohibits the usage of the library in commercial projects — hence forcing the companies to purchase the commercial license of the libraries. Libraries such as typeitjs, fullpagejs use this license to fund the project.
Other libraries are moving towards using an open-core model where the access to the library is granted only upon purchasing a license. One such example is @module-federation/nextjs-mf which used PrivJs to distribute a version of webpack’s “Module Federation” plugin to support nextjs. The developer used this money to fund the project — which is a win-win for both consumers as well as the maintainers.
So basically, “paid open-source” are the projects that are intended to be open-source, but somehow makes the end-user to pay for using it in their applications.
