It all started with a comment I made to a fellow AI hacker one day at the SundAI club - “I don’t recommend open source to anyone as a way of making money”. The conversation which followed lasted for a while, and ended up as a quest for the real answer to whether it is possible to make money with open source software.
Rationale behind my original stand
Back in January, I had used an AI coding agent to study the implementation of OpenCode, turn it into a document, and then used the same coding agent to create a new one based on that document. The whole story is in this post. This exercise blew my mind. I thought why would anyone pay for a product whose source code is open and can be scanned by AI agents. Hence my stand which I expressed to my friend.
Are open source projects making money?
My idea was that barring rare exceptions like Red Hat, open source projects don’t make big money. I asked around, and found to my surprise that the world had changed. Yes, there aren’t open-source unicorns popping up, but The Linux Foundation, Anaconda, and Zig Software Foundation seem to be making decent money. Zig is actually very transparent about their income and it’s not bad at all.
The pattern seemed to be you could make money from an open source project if
- it is the foundation for other projects
- it is used heavily
- it is owned by a non-profit foundation
Interview with a successful open source founder
I decided to go further, and reached out to the founder and CEO of ReviewBoard - Christian Hammond. I knew about him since the time I used his product in my last job. Gladly he agreed to be interviewed by yours truly, and we chatted on a Monday afternoon about the business of open source. Here are some insights I got from him.
Q: Do companies pay for open source software?
A: Christian said that companies pay for ReviewBoard not because it is open source, but despite it being open source. In other words - when companies see value in a software product they pay for it. It really doesn’t matter to the person who signs the check where the source code lives.
Q: What is Reviewboard’s pricing strategy?
A: Reviewboard customers pay for support. Some customers also pay for their hosted version which is more like a SaaS.
Q: Do they pay their contributors? How?
A: As of now all the contributors are part of the company. So they don’t need to bother about sponsoring external contributors.
Q: What kind of software should be open source?
A: According to Christian, programming languages should be open source. Essentially all ‘foundational software’ should be so.
Q: How long has ReviewBoard been around?
A: It’s been 20 years. They pre-date GitHub!
Q: How is AI impacting code reviews
A: This was a surprise to me. Christian said that ReviewBoard usage is coming down in some companies which are doing away (!) with code reviews. I hope this is a temporary trend - I don’t think the basics of software engineering can be eliminated.
Can we draw a conclusion
It is hard to conclude anything about tech in 2026 - the winds of AI are blowing strong. It is clear that open source software projects which have matured over decades will continue to become even more important. We also know that open source is one of the big factors which made AI coding possible - otherwise there would have been no data to train the LLMs on. Perhaps that will also help raise the importance of open source software in the next decade. And that should translate into money, in theory.