AWawwstn·Jul 23, 2014
Building a viable business on top of an open source project is totally possible. But, like building lots of other types of businesses, it can be difficult.
These challenges cut close to some things we are aiming to solve at Assembly [http://assembly.com]. One such question we hope to answer is this: "how can people build a real, profitable company in a collaborative, open manner like they build in an open source environment?"
An example is Coderwall, which makes more than $25,000/month [1] and is built and maintained by the community. Each month, revenue goes to the people who are building the product. All the code is publicly available [2], and licensed to be used non-commercially. A core team of contributors guide vision and quality control, but anyone can participate.
It's not exactly open source, but products on Assembly are built in
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the open and anyone can dive in and help out. Some products have lofty ambitions to make big revenue, and others are are more aimed at being a public offering like a traditional open source project.
[1] https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/coderwall-coinholder-up...
[2] https://github.com/assemblymade/coderwall