The Linphone project is an open source solution that was first released in 2001. It started as a personal project done on spare time and it is now a sustainable company employing 20 people (15 of them being software developers). We believe that employing open source software developers is the best way to pay them for their contribution to the open source ecosystem.

We are often asked how an open source company can make money and grow on the long term. We rely on three different sources of income:
- corporate customers, by selling our technology to third parties who wish to integrate it to build their own products. Our revenue has been progressively increased thanks to a business model based on three types of income: licensing, support, and developments on demand. Third party companies are willing to finance the development of your great open source technology if you ask them to!
- public subventions, via the response to a call for expressions of interest and the use of research tax credit (CIR)
- end-users, by selling our solution in a SaaS mode to companies who wish to use it « as is » for their internal needs.
This talk will highlight why and how we are reworking our business model with the aim of wearing two hats: technology provider and software editor. This will allow us to obtain a new source of income, that we hope to be recurrent.