I’m a big fan of Laravel. I’ve found it well thought out and easy to work with. When I heard about Livewire, I checked it out, but decided not to pursue for an idea I had. It seems like it wouldn’t really scale the way Liveview could. (Not that scaling would be a huge problem for my project.) Still, an interesting development, and really impressive achievement to manage that level of sponsorship.
I think a lot of the people working on the larger projects are doing that partly as part of their jobs. I know Nerves development is driven forward a bunch by the needs of industry clients. In some sense that means these projects are monetized. But it also likely means the maintainers are likely giving both work time and spare time to the project.
Separate monetization like this thing has is also a lot of work. And while I don’t think a lot of Elixir devs live off of their open source work I think most Elixir devs doing open source work are finding good work. To do monetization like this you basically have to want to run a business. I don’t think everybody wants to do that.
For sustainable, funded open source in the long term I think monetization is absolutely something to look at. Assuming the maintainers want to live directly off of the open source project.
4 Likes
That’s definitely how Oban started; scratching an itch as part of my job. Really, it was scratching a series of itches. Without that initial experience driving development I don’t think it is possible to create a fully realized product.
After that point the amount of support work, bug fixes, feature additions, etc. can easily outstrip the amount of OSS time most workplaces will support. To keep the project going you have to work on it in “free” time, or find a way to make it part of your actual job.
That’s certainly a dream. Oban still has a long way to go to be sustainable.
2 Likes
