I believe no one does open source projects to make money, because it is not as profitable as applying screen protectors at the overpass.
But even without this idea, maintaining an open source project can also encounter some very headache-inducing practical problems, such as server and CDN expenses. Taking DPlayer as an example, the barrage interface server costs more than 2000 yuan per year, and the video CDN cost in the documentation also costs more than 1500 yuan per year. And as the number of users increases, these expenses only increase and do not decrease.
Although the sponsorship methods have been prominently displayed in the README, I didn't have much hope, after all, DPlayer users are almost all Chinese, and it is already very difficult to find a user who can clearly describe their own problems. The results were as expected, the sporadic sponsorships received in a year were just a drop in the bucket. To be honest, I am not willing to bear these expenses myself, and coupled with the fact that most users are pirated and adult websites, I once had the idea of giving up.
Many friends already know what happened later, UpYun and Pear Cloud sponsored DPlayer successively. UpYun sponsored all the CDN expenses of DPlayer, while Pear Cloud provides a considerable amount of financial sponsorship every month.
Generally speaking, if a group or company uses an open source project in a commercial product, sponsoring the open source project has direct commercial benefits: it can keep the framework on which the product depends healthy and actively maintained. The difference is that UpYun did not use DPlayer, and there will be no direct commercial return in the short term. It may be more of a sentiment. As a commercial company, UpYun's generous sponsorship without seeking returns is particularly touching to me.
Of course, this article is not intended to call for everyone to sponsor or apply screen protectors at the overpass. The sponsorship from these two companies is already enough to cover the daily expenses beyond human resources. In addition to sponsorship, contributing code, reporting a clearly described bug or suggestion, a word of encouragement, or simply using my open source project can also make me very happy. These are all motivations for me to continue spending time on open source.
Here is some advertising:
Pear Cloud is a fog computing technology research and development company, focusing on providing users with IaaS architecture, PaaS platform, and SaaS software services. Pear Fog is not only a resource pool that spans from the network center to the edge, but also a new type of P2P system. Among them, Fog CDN helps video vendors reduce content distribution costs and improve quality in a transparent and web-friendly manner.
UpYun is a well-known domestic enterprise-level cloud service provider, dedicated to providing customers with one-stop online business acceleration services, including object storage, HTTPS/SSL certificates, multimedia processing (WebP adaptive, H.265 adaptive, etc.), image recognition, text recognition, short video SDK, live streaming SDK, co-browsing SDK, and other services. UpYun has 6 data processing centers, more than 300 domestic CDN nodes, 15 overseas CDN nodes, 5000 servers, 5TB of reserved bandwidth, and an average of over 100 billion requests per day.