Simon Willison’s Weblog

What is a good business model for open source projects?

16th January 2011

My answer to What is a good business model for open source projects? on Quora

Consulting.

Build software that becomes widely used, then charge out your expertise. Plenty of open source projects are supported in this way.

Posted 16th January 2011 at 10:08 am · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol - 9th July 2026
sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations - 7th July 2026
sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25) - 5th July 2026

This is What is a good business model for open source projects? by Simon Willison, posted on 16th January 2011.

open-source 309 programming-languages 42 startups 190 quora 1,005

Next: Is there any fairly easy way to travel internationally without taking a corporate airline, cruise, bus etc?

Previous: What boardgame is the best to play for a scheming rat bastard?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe