Sachin Neravath on LinkedIn: I made $100k in revenue from an open-source JavaScript library in 14…

Open source projects, the infrastructure of digital public goods, have long relied on unsustainable funding sources like Github Sponsors, Open Collective, or Buy Me A Coffee. Besides the very few that have reached commercial success by transforming into enterprise SaaS, the vast majority of projects failed to find adequate funding.

I was first attracted to open source – public code that everybody relies upon – after observing that its developers are creating trillions of dollars in economic value, while giving away their code for free.

A number of monetisation models for open-source work have been put forward in the last decade, but none of them has been able to scale and solve the problem in a fundamental way. The reason being, open-source work is a microeconomic singularity — a paradox in capitalism that can’t be corrected with donations, cryptocurrencies, or freemium models. I... See more