Who Pays Your Bills? Sustainability, Community and Business: The Open Source Triangle

“Who pays your bills?” was the first question my now-CTO asked me,when we didn’t even know each other. Years later, we co-founded OPENGIS.ch, a 40-person company that thrives on geospatial open-source software and gives back by contributing heavily to the projects we build upon.

In this talk, I’ll share our journey building QField, an open-source mobile app with more than 2 million downloads, and creating a sustainable business model around it and QGIS. I’ll explain how the QGIS.org community works, and show why open source is not just a philosophy, but a real business opportunity.

We’ll explore sustainability, community, and business, the three pillars that allow open-source software to flourish and its contributors to make a living from it.