Crowdfunding campaigns enable individuals to bring their ideas to production by appealing directly to the end-market and the global community. A number of these projects are open source, seemingly, counteracting the funding process. We interviewed founders, developers and managers of 13 crowdfunding initiatives involving open source products to determine how communities, crowdfunding campaigns and open source are associated. Our findings verified the existence of common characteristics among the cases, the emergence of a family-like relationship between the organizers and the community, as well as the community perceived as a success factor. We suggest that the development of certain niche products inherently leads to the adoption of open source as a licensing model and crowdfunding as the capital gathering process.