It’s free? How do people make money?

This is a complex question and there are several avenues to go down:

• Consulting (the software is free but maybe it requires specific expertise to use effectively)
• Support (shared accountability/liability, domain expertise, SLA)
• Value addon (core of software is free but the professional/enterprise versions have extra features)
• Drive adoption (more people using your tools means more opportunity to segway into a conversation about paid services)
• Sometimes it is about reducing cost rather than making money. Build something and let other people contribute is the fastest way to get robust project going.

Why would anyone want Open Source

There are many reasons, I am going to outline a few:

• By allowing everyone free access to the code people who run into issues can help identify and even submit fixes leaving just approval to collaborators and maintainers in some cases.
• Enhanced Security: more eyes means more people spotting issues before they happen
• Vendor Neutral: while you can obviously have vendor specific open source, most open source is vendor agnostic and ensures that the direction of important projects are never controlled by a single company. Some good examples are the Apache Foundation and Open Source Initiative.

My Open source contributions

I am a big believer in Open Source, In my career I have spent more time working with open than closed source tools. I contribute to various projects at various levels from helping answer users questions, submits new features, submitting bug fixes, and being a maintainer who moderates contributions as well as communication channels.

You can check out my public profile on github: https://github.com/majormoses

I contribute to various open source to projects and am a maintainer for the following community projects:

• 200+ different sensu monitoring and data/event manipulation plugins: https://github.com/sensu-plugins. How to get involved
• Sous Chefs cookbooks: https://github.com/sous-chefs
• Sensu Chef cookbook: https://github.com/sensu/sensu-chef
• Sensu 2 Chef cookbook: https://github.com/sensu/sensu-go-chef
• Uchiwa (sensu dashboard) Chef cookbook: https://github.com/sensu/uchiwa-chef
• SumoLogic logging and metrics chef cookbook: https://github.com/SumoLogic/sumologic-collector-chef-cookbook
• Netuitive monitoring agent chef cookbook: https://github.com/Netuitive/chef-netuitive
• Redis cookbook: https://github.com/brianbianco/redisio

 Sponsoring Open Source Contributions

• If you are looking for a larger project reach out and we can discuss it on a per case basis. I generally give pricing breaks for significant open source project work.
• If you are looking to help keep my beer and coffee supply up feel free to donate: paypal.me/majormoses

Open Source Projects I donate to continue active development:

• Free Software Foundation: https://www.fsf.org
• Linux Foundation: http://www.linuxfoundation.org
• Apache Software Foundation: http://www.apache.org/foundation
• Open Source Initiative: https://opensource.org
• Mozilla Foundation: https://mozilla.org
• Curl: https://curl.haxx.se
• Rubocop: https://github.com/bbatsov/rubocop
• Rspec: https://rspec.info
• Lets Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org
• Local Stack: https://localstack.cloud