I want to submit a PR to remove Caddy from the "open core" category... or at least add it to several other categories which helped make it possible for me to work on Caddy full-time. Open Core did not work for us (hence the link to the retrospective).
At first it was a donation button, then an award from Mozilla (MOSS) -- kind of like a grant but they emphasized it was not technically a grant, probably for legal reasons -- that gave my college student self 6 months of runway while I finished school. Then I continued worked on Caddy while in graduate school, until I got hired by Ardan Labs to design and launch Caddy 2. That ended just before the launch of Caddy 2, when ZeroSSL acquired the project and to this day I rely on sponsorships from ZeroSSL, Stripe, and several other sponsors to work on Caddy full time.
"Sponsorware" doesn't really apply to us, but there are definitely features and fixes that have been possible because sponsors funded the work.
We offer some paid support too, but that's pretty time-intensive and doesn't pay the recurring bills, just one-off contracts.
I've rejected venture capital because it's not the right path for me or the project IMO.
How do you feel working full time on a tool, and not using the tool (which presumably is why the tool is valuable)?
It's not just a paycheck, obviously. You could earn more working on something else. Did you just get "hooked" on an originally you project?
I use Caddy often. Even some of the features coming out next month are based on my own needs. So that's a plus: it's not a project that's irrelevant to me.
True, I could earn more at a large or VC-backed tech company. But the flexibility of working on something of which I'm the world expert is quite satisfying and is paying the bills for now, so I'll probably ride this wave as long as I can or want to.
Building something from the ground-up and exerting so much effort to make it the best in its class has been invigorating, so you could say I got "hooked" on it. (But I do reject the notion that it's "my baby" as some people refer to it. It has over 300 contributors by now and I'm not sure I'm even the top code committer at this point.)
At first it was a donation button, then an award from Mozilla (MOSS) -- kind of like a grant but they emphasized it was not technically a grant, probably for legal reasons -- that gave my college student self 6 months of runway while I finished school. Then I continued worked on Caddy while in graduate school, until I got hired by Ardan Labs to design and launch Caddy 2. That ended just before the launch of Caddy 2, when ZeroSSL acquired the project and to this day I rely on sponsorships from ZeroSSL, Stripe, and several other sponsors to work on Caddy full time.
"Sponsorware" doesn't really apply to us, but there are definitely features and fixes that have been possible because sponsors funded the work.
We offer some paid support too, but that's pretty time-intensive and doesn't pay the recurring bills, just one-off contracts.
I've rejected venture capital because it's not the right path for me or the project IMO.
Anyway, I wrote about my recommendations for funding open source projects here: https://matt.life/writing/the-asymmetry-of-open-source