Monetizing Open Source

Posted on May 21, 2019 by Jonathan H. Wage


In our quest to make Doctrine financially sustainable, we have created Doctrine Company, LLC under which the team can conduct business. We've had a strong 10 years of open source success but we believe that in order for Doctrine to be truly sustainable and to last another decade, we need to diversify and monetize the project. It is our goal to be able to generate enough money through the project to fund full or part time work on the project. Below you will find details of some of our monetization efforts.

Patreon

Patreon is a platform that allows open source maintainers, artists, creators, etc. to create relationships with their users and offer them benefits for becoming a patron.

If you would like to make a donation to the project, Patreon is the place to do it. Depending on the tier, we offer a few different benefits:

  • A mention on Twitter.
  • Your name and website link on the Doctrine website.
  • Priority responses to Stack Overflow or GitHub issues/PRs.
  • Placement on a Partners page on the Doctrine website, with your logo, link, and a paragraph advertising your company's services.

Become a Patreon of Doctrine today!

Consulting

Under the Doctrine Company, we are providing consulting and training services to companies that use PHP. The services we offer are not limited to Doctrine itself. Our team specializes in producing high quality PHP. Whether you are starting a new project or modernizing a legacy application, we can help your team level up their skills with tools like the following:

  • Doctrine DBAL - Connect to your favorite RDBMS using Doctrine's database abstraction library.
  • Doctrine Database Migrations - Safely manage your database schema and keep it up to date.
  • Doctrine ORM - Represent your domain model cleanly with plain old PHP objects and ensure the integrity of your data.
  • PHP_CodeSniffer - Keep aesthetic debates out of your code reviews by adopting a coding standard and enforcing it in your build process. We can help integrate Doctrine's own coding standard into your project or help codify your own.
  • Psalm / PHPStan - Statically analyze your codebase and find bugs that would otherwise only be found at runtime in production.

If you are interested, take a look at our Consulting page or contact us at [email protected] for more information.

Events

We will host regular monthly webinars using Zoom. Each month we will have different topics presented to you by members of the Doctrine Core team or greater PHP community. We already have some great topics lined up for the next few months:

Tidelift

Tidelift is a managed open source subscription service backed by creators and maintainers. Development teams get better maintained open source. Maintainers get paid.

We have partnered with Tidelift as a maintainer to guarantee a high level of maintenance for their customers. In return, Tidelift pays Doctrine maintainers a percentage of what the customer pays. Tidelift is attempting to create a marketplace of open source maintainers and customers with the goal of providing higher levels of confidence for commercial entities when using open source. This can sometimes be one of the biggest challenges for using open source in the corporate world. Tidelift is taking a unique approach to solving this problem and we are excited to be a part of it!

Carbon Ads

One of the most valuable assets we have besides software is our website and the traffic we receive every month. You may have noticed some subtle ad placements on our website. These text-based ads are provided by Carbon Ads which is an ad network optimized for reaching designers and developers. We understand ads can be annoying and we hope that our users understand the trade-off we've made by choosing to place ads on our website.

Partners

Finally, we are partnering with commercial entities and other projects that use Doctrine to cross promote each other. Through our partner network we hope to introduce our users to vetted services and offerings from which they can benefit. Thanks to our Partners for supporting Doctrine.