you don't need to be a committer to make money from Open source
Posted by Ian Holsman
I think Dana Blankenhorn has got it slightly wrong when he says in his recent article, ”How to make money from open source Apache”:
This is how you make money in open source. You become vital. You become a big open source company by becoming vital to big projects.
I don’t think this is exactly correct. you don’t need to be vital (or even a direct contributor) to make money off open source.
Take a support model, the ‘throat to choke’ so to speak. what you need to make this work is a call centre, some trainers, and some competent engineers who know how to maintain a patch set. none of these people need to be in the ‘core’. In fact I would go as far as saying that putting a lead developer in a support role is not the best use of their resources, and you might get more bang for your buck hiring a regular SW engineer and getting him to learn the code.
You have to remember that these core developers are usually not just knowledgable about their product the contribute to. Through the years of participating in OSS, they have knowledge of other open source projects, and more importantly they understand what is possible to do with open source products and tools.
That is, they should be thought of more as architects and EAI experts than code jockeys.