After my previous two posts on the topic, it is now time to discuss how we make money from Open Source Software. Before I start, I want to clarify what I’m talking about:
- RavenDB is a document database.
- It is about a decade old.
- The server is released under the AGPL/commercial license.
- We offer free community and developer licenses without any AGPL hindrance.
- The RavenDB client APIs are licensed under the MIT license.
- RavenDB (the product) is created by Hibernating Rhinos (the company).
I created RavenDB because I couldn’t not to. It was an idea that had to go out of my head. I looked up the details, and toward the end of 2008, I started to work on it as a side project. At the time I was involved in five or six active open source projects, had just gotten my NHibernate Profiler product to stable ground, and was turning the idea of getting deeper into databases in my head for a while. So I sat down and wrote some code.