Open Source Developers - How do they make money?

How do open source developers make money? I know open source is all about freedom, but the folks who spend their time developing open source software need to have some income source.

Professional open source software, such as PHP, MySQL etc. are just as good, if not even better, than their commercial counterparts (ASP, MSSQL) - in order to be that way, those software teams need excellent programmers who, I guess, work fulltime on that software.

Or am I wrong? Do the PHP / MySQL (and other professional open source software) programmers just work for the open source world in their free time, without any materialistic reward?

I know that some open source software teams get money for services (I read on Devshed somewhere that RedHat makes a lot of money from their services) - is that also the case with other teams?

Do they get support from people who donate to them? Are they supported by governments??

I'm really quite clueless about this issue - I'd appreciate if someone could explain to me how it works, or maybe direct me to a good article / explanation of it elsewhere on the Internet.

This depends on who we ask from. Mandrake and RedHat provide additional services that gives them income, which then allows them to continue to develop their software. They also sell their software, in the form of CDs and handbooks. When it comes to such as PHP and MySQL, it is different. For those developers, they mostly on their free time and have other fulltime jobs.

Well, you have to define what you mean by developer- I consider myself an open source developer, and I make my money by building websites using linux, mod_perl, apache, MySQL and whatever else strikes my fancy as a fulltime job. I also consult on the side doing the same thing.

I'm doing pretty good, too. My clients don't really care HOW it's done, except that my things are done so that they are fast, cheap, and reliable.

If you're talking about the folks that build the tools I use, then I'd think it depends on the business model they have, or whether or not they even need/want to make money.

A lot of enlightened code shops allow their coders to work on "core" open source technologies and return stuff to the community because they know the value they get from free software. A number of perl modules came to being in this way, and I'd imagine a lot of other software too.

Yeah, I was talking about the folks who make the tools, such as PHP, MySQL or Apache...

I believe I read on the MySQL site that for serious commercial use one should pay for the use of their software - that, of couse, is a form of income. If the MySQL coders get paid, does all the income come from companies who pay MySQL for licences to use their software for commercial use?

As for Apache and PHP - do the developers of the software get paid for their work on it?

Not exactly. From mysql.com:


Nope, as with RedHat etc., selling support is (supposed to be, can't look into their wallet) their main source of income.

Nope, it's done in people's free time. The guys at zend.com (try to) make a little extra on the side by selling PHP-related products.
A lot of open source things get done simply for the passion of coding. Other projects get opensourced because the company developing it believes in the model. Also, IMHO, there are a lot of developers who don't even realize what is in the license they're publishing their code under.

bit oversimplified here but look at it this way: Some people make cookies because they want to make a fortune selling cookies, and some people make cookies because they love cookies, Which cookies would you rather eat?

Each organization or company handles income differently. MySQL sells support for their product to orgs that use it on a wide-scale basis. RedHat relies on it's support services, plus it sells bundled packages. FreeBSD and Slackware are volunteer programmers that rely on you and I to donate money.

A lot of people ask the same question, where is their money in open-source. Sometimes there isn't money in it, but more often than not, people or organizations pay for support and commercial versions of the product.

I'm a huge open source advocate, but I also believe that programmers have the right to copyright and sell their programs. They should have the freedom to make the decision. If you are thinking about developing for Linux/Unix and you want to sell your products, then by all means.