How do developers earn on free frameworks?

Question

Marketing

Hello.
How developers of free frameworks make money, namely developers of frameworks. If everything is more or less clear with cms, then with the framework it is not clear. And absolutely anyone. This is not a freemium, and they do not make money on advertising.
If the only goal is ranking, the company's notoriety, then yes.

Answer 1

Take the same Laravel:
- At least 3 associated PAID projects (forge, spark, envoyer).
- Conferences with a hefty price tag.
- Advice
- I'm not sure, but maybe laracasts unfastens something.
And so it is with many large OpenSource projects. Earnings go to enterprise solutions based on their project. (Same paid support).
Some (I don't remember offhand) OpenSource projects receive funding from large organizations (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM).

Answer 2

Have you ever wondered why frameworks are needed at all?
To speed up the development - cut down more dough in the same time frame.
They can easily use them themselves to create custom websites.
The framework can be developed directly as part of one of the large and non-urgent orders, according to the principle "we harness for a long time, then we drive fast."
On the contrary, if the author of frameworks does not create sites on his framework, and the framework itself has written from the bay, then it is very doubtful that the framework will be good for something - he has no experience.

Answer 3

most likely it is, the framework is developed for personal needs, for example, to simplify their own work, then they make it available to a wide range of people, and if it turns out to be useful to someone, then additional users and developers appear, thereby increasing functionality. And development funding does not fall on the shoulders of one person or company. And plus, there are people who need the missing functionality, but cannot implement it on their own, but can pay for its implementation - about so many complex things appear.

Answer 4

A very immodest question with a rather trivial answer, but nevertheless, a hundred pitfalls.
Yes, there are thousands of ways to monetize, but direct sales are still much more effective in terms of making a profit. Such money is many times easier to count, such products, suddenly, are easier to sell. Finally, the return comes many times faster, so the payback period for the software sold is also shorter.
But. When money is not the main thing, the question of improving the world arises. And if you just take it and improve it, at least a little bit not so difficult, then not dying of hunger is a little more difficult. The monetization policy can be very diverse, from the now fashionable SaaS or even PaaS, to a very conservative paid round the clock technical support. You can upload not everything to open source, but only a part, earning on the rest, you can modify it on demand, you can generally produce strange monetization models, like various kinds of certification (like Oracle with Java, although this is not quite open).
In general, it is worth noting that today almost any more or less serious company invests in open source. Not because it's fashionable, but because it's convenient, it's communism out of the blue, the ideology of Marx and Lenin works out 146% here. And there are simple reasons for that.
Language. When I come to work and talk about linux, I almost always mean posix. When I work and write code in vim, build from a Makefile with gcc, debug with gdb, and then send to the server with git push, I use ready-made, long-developed, debugged products. After that, the firmware in the form of a binary code is sent to a piece of iron, this piece of iron falls into place and the plane flies. Inside there, a cloud of bytes flies back and forth using arinc, rs232, ethernet, vga, usb and other parallelism, but the plane is still flying. There are always errors, but the CRC-32 easily catches errors, and even corrects them on the fly, and the plane continues to fly. The good thing about free software is that it's easy for them to set standards. Wrote once, tested a trillion times, used Googleplex once.
It was not just that Comrade Stallman spoke about GNU, from which, in fact, it all began. That it is not like a free beer, but like a free speech. We talk, we communicate, we constantly exchange ideas. This cannot be stopped, even if draconian fines and terrible laws are introduced. But there is no need to stop, you better leave, finally, communication naturally free. We communicate and do not ask for money. And we won’t die of hunger, because planes still have to fly =)

Answer 5

How does wordpress make money? Why only framework? Or the same free world OF tanks? On everything around this free. Free - it means popular, but you can fasten something to the popular, something paid and cut down the dough.
Come up with something good, give it away for free, and when the popularity starts to go off scale, you will find a lot of ways to monetize. Even on contextual advertising on a site with docks and a forum.

Answer 6

Donate, paid technical support, contextual advertising, a plus sign in the resume...
It will be interesting to hear more options.
Abroad, they say, grants are allocated for open source.
They write here (very old article) - netsago.org/ru/docs/3/1

There are several ways to profit from the project and the site. And some of them have more potential than others. Some work better than others. To use any of them, you must be persistent.
Here is a short list of ways to make money:
Advertising
Sponsorship
Selling software
Selling merchandise
Writing custom applications.
Paid consultations

Answer 7

consultations
conferences
training
writing critical code
evangelism

Answer 8

Many developers release frameworks just to get a "promotion at work".

Answer 9

1. Tech. money support. Besides them, hardly anyone knows their framework better. Yes, and advertised primarily by the author of the framework.
2. Attention of potential employers, a job offer for a lot of money. It's so common that it's already a direct test written in the documentation for frameworks - I'm a poor student from a poor country, someone take me away from here. I personally saw.
3. Outreach to the community. Despite the fact that the framework develops as the author needs. In fact, only the author decides which merge request to accept and which not. That is, getting free workers. For the same point 1.