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  1. Do you think they are making money out of jQuery javascript library?

  2. It seems it gets a lot of efforts in doing something like jQuery, what's the catch?

  3. More generally speaking, if someone decide to sell a software library, do you think he can make any money out of it?

Thanks!

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4 Answers

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  1. Unlikely, but it is possible someone will buy them. Look what happen to MySQL.

  2. A lot of it is contributed by community

  3. It depends on the library and demand for it. Linux vs. Ubuntu.

It seems a bit a different turn of events here: http://appendto.com/

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What do you mean Linux vs Ubuntu? Ubuntu uses the Linux kernel (generally). – J. Pablo Fernández Apr 14 '10 at 5:16
This is exactly what I meant. Ubuntu is free, just as Linux, but added options, like support costs money. They took free product and put a personal spin on it. I would not want to use Linux on my PC but I have Ubuntu on two laptops. Back to your question, can you sell libraries. Yes and no. You may mav a library that many like but nobody wants to pay for, but perhaps you can charge for set-up or custom work?.. – usabilitest Apr 14 '10 at 12:08
up vote 1 down vote

Unless you can make a library that is considerably better than what is open-sourced you will be out of luck. But, on the ASP side there are some for-pay component libraries that make it easier for developers, so it can work, depending on the market focus.

jQuery won't be anything other than free, I expect, as John Resig, the main person behind it, seems to be very involved with open-source, since he is heavily involved with Firefox development.

There are many benefits in learning how to create your own library, depending on your interests. In the past it was almost a rite of passage for Unix programmers to write their own shells, I can see the same idea for people to write their own frameworks.

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up vote 0 down vote

It's cliche to say you can make money on open source tools by selling support, but the guys at ExtJs do exactly that -- and that's another cross-browser Javascript library, so it's a very relevant example!

Having said that, there's only a few companies that truly just make money off support. The jQuery guys might have enough eyeballs that they could get away with it, but in general I would advise against that as a business strategy if you're starting from scratch.

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up vote 0 down vote

No, I don't think so. Why would they be selling? Support? that's not a startup, that's a consulting business around a specific library. It might go very well but it won't scale like selling copies of a program or a monthly subscription to a service.

If you are thinking of creating a layer of code on top of jQuery that makes it better and is not free, I really doubt people will pick it up. They'll just use plain jQuery.

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