How to Turn Your Open Source Project into a Stable Income Stream

You may maintain several open source projects. Ever thought of making money from it?

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Programmers often spend their free time on personal software development projects. Many programmers turn their experiments and innovative ideas into open source projects that everyone can use for free. The majority of the open source projects on GitHub were made for developers by developers. In other words, programmers can integrate most open source projects with their software projects by saving additional development time. Moreover, there are many open source developer tools to make developer’s life easier.

Programmers often work with open source projects as a hobby, like me. However, we work with our open source projects while working with a software engineering job that helps to pay our bills. Therefore, undoubtedly, we can spend more time on our open source projects if those projects help us to pay our bills.

I make a considerable amount of money with my open source projects. In this story, I will guide you on how you can turn your open source project into an income stream without losing the existing community.

Make Sure That Your Project Solves A Problem.

Behind every successful open source project, there is an engineering problem that everybody needs to solve. For example, The zx project got more than 18k GitHub stargazers within three months. It introduced a way to write Bash-like shell scripts with JavaScript. The Bash scripting language is indeed slow and not developer-friendly. Every programmer often struggles with shell scripts when the script’s logic becomes complex because Bash is not a general-purpose language. The zx project solved a problem that the majority of developers face.

You need to ensure that your project is successful before you think about the monetization process. Your open source project’s success depends on the size of your developer audience. If you get frequent feature requests, feedback, and questions in your open source project’s communication channels, congrats, you can continue to the next step. Otherwise, make sure that your open source project solves a problem that the majority of…