A Simplified Outline as to If It’s Possible to Make a Business Out of Writing Add Ons for a REALLY Popular Open Source Program

Hi,

Apologies in advance if this is a well-understood concept. Non-engineer here, big time.

What I'm trying to figure out is, how a person could be able to write an add on for an opensource program and make money at it?

I've seen some VERY POPULAR open source programs that have LONG lists of add ons.

In these cases it seems the add on makers give them away, and the ONLY way they make money, if at all, is through Patreon / good will, or SOME seem to use a "Patreon-Contributors-Get-Newest-Programs-First".

I can't see that as much of a viable model.

Seeing this has got me to thinking that – if the program is open source then, there's either an outright prohibition to selling add ons, or, there's so much disclosure required along with the Open Source license that there's no way to "hide" or obscure your own work enough to protect it?

Total neewb questions, I know – and as I said, apologies in advance. But, for anyone who's not averse to going into conceptual details, I'd be really grateful.

If it's the outright prohibition (is that a thing in Open source?), well, then that's easy enough to understand.

But, if it's about the disclosure – I'm thinking there must be some sort of way to compartmentalize the pieces of the application? Such that you could render the "new" functions / whatever you've designed into a non-accessible / non-readable format, and then those pieces work with the overall codebase which itself is always visible. Is that possible?

I mean, if there's a yawning need for an "x" add-on application, is there a way one could write it and sell it as its own "widget? Or, does the theory of an application BEING opensource pretty much make such a thing undoable?

Many thanks!