Am I missing something? I mean, I know you said "we're still small", but:

>The total gross revenue during Q3 was $16,134, which after transaction fees is $14,972. >The monthly revenue from all subscriptions is, accounting for credit card fees and amortizing yearly payments, is $5,952. >SourceHut has $13,858 in cash at the time of writing.

Those figures are tiny! SourceHut doesn't make enough money to pay a typical full-time software developer. That doesn't feel like a viable open source business model to me.

We pay two full-time software developers, actually, and are likely to hire a third next year. We don't pay especially generously, but we do all make a living and we're satisfied with our income. Plus, we earn more from the consulting arm I mentioned - which has comparible revenue to our SaaS offering, and is also 100% FOSS.

The title of the article isn't "There's still no viable billion dollar open source business model". We have a business. It's a small business, but a viable business nonetheless. Our business is growing more slowly than the typical VC-funded software startup that we commonly associate with tech businesses in $CURRENTYEAR, but it is profitable and growing nonetheless.

I don't need something to have a billion dollars in revenue to be "viable". But that "viable" word is important. A business as lean as SourceHut clearly feels like it's in the start up phase, it doesn't feel like it's reached viability to me.

With just 2 software developers doing this work, I wonder what happens when one of the them is hit by the proverbial bus (goes out on parental leave, takes another job, etc). Because that's a thing that happens and is handled in real, viable companies.

And I'm guessing these software developers have some ownership stake in the company and are accepting below market salaries for now, in the hope that SourceHut becomes valuable enough to cash in that way. But folks won't stick around for below market pay forever, especially if it gets to a point where it looks like the big payday is never coming.

Well, we are a startup, we've only been here for 2 years and our product is still in alpha. But we are already profitable and sustainable, and have been for a while - that counts as viable in my book. We're going to have to come up with a definition of viable that disagrees with that if you want to argue it further.

Our planning accounts for the bus factor. It'd be bad, but not unrecoverable. And because our software is entirely open source, it wouldn't even be the end of the world for our customers.

And no, our other employee does not have a stake in the company, other than a personal one. Our motivations are not based on future earning potential, some future "cashing in" moment, but on being able to do what we enjoy full-time. Either of us could (and have) worked for more, much more, but we're comfortable and happy with what we're doing. The business is basically a way for us to be comfortable and happy with our work first, and a profit vehicle second.

The fact that this is unusual, and makes you raise your eyebrows and question the viability of the whole affair, is disappointing to me. We believe that this is the socially responsible way to start a business, and that it should be more normalized in the tech business community. That our business is viable is a mathematical fact.

Agreed, we're just thinking about our own, different, definitions of viability. No big deal.

That nit aside, what you've done with SourceHut is really cool. Congrats on getting it to where it is today and best of luck continuing to grow and improve!

It's opensource + a hosted offering, which is a pretty popular business model used by eg MongoDB.

By my understanding, though, you're not being paid directly for open source. You're paid for the code hosting, etc. You might arguably say open source is what's bringing in customers for your paid services. The problem is that most open source is not like that, with no similar opportunity for monetization.

I'm not sure why this is supposed to be a meaningful difference. We write open source software and make money doing it. Why does it have to apply to every kind of software project to be valid?

Because if there are software projects that can't practically be free software while bringing in enough money to fund development, then free-software advocates should acknowledge that sometimes proprietary software is a perfectly valid option. Put another way, while free software is good and should be encouraged when it's practical, I don't think it's right to insist that proprietary software is bad and should always be avoided. The companies that abuse the power that comes with the proprietary model are well-known (and thankfully I no longer work for one of them). But some developers of proprietary software are just trying to develop good software while making a living, the only way they've judged that they can.

Also, the hosting business model sometimes leads to misaligned incentives. I don't believe Sourcehut falls in this category. But consider, if a developer of an open-source package makes their money from hosting, then what incentive is there to make the package easy to self-host?