Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Economic Slump hits Open Source

Posted by michael on from the deer-in-the-headlights dept.

adamjone writes: "C|NET and Yahoo! are running a story about the hit that open source software is taking during this economic slump. Open source development is a hobby for me, not my full-time job. I find that I have more time to work on my project during times when my full-time job is slow, or we don't have enough work. Is open source truly being driven by those who make it their full-time occupation? If so, is there a happy medium for keeping bread on the table and still working within the open source community?" At least Microsoft is doing well.

2 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Surprise, surprise by ChaosDiscordSimple · · Score: 3, Informative
    Open source software has been and will continue to be profitable. It may not be insanely profitable, it may not apply to every problem, it may be unconventional, but it works. It will slowly grow, because once open source moves into an area, it becomes very hard to dislodge.

    Sleepcat Software's open source Berkeley DB has "been profitable since inception" in 1996

    Using multiple licensing models L. Peter Deutsch is able to provide Ghostscript under the GPL and make enough money to retire.

    Cygnus Support (now part of Red Hat), was founded in 1989 and was "profitable, increasingly profitable, every single year" before the Red Hat buyout.

    It's very unconvential, O'Reilly must be happy enough with sales of books to pay Larry Wall to keep developing Perl.

    Open Source works. Maybe not as well as VA Linu... erm... Systems wants it to, but it does.

  2. Re: EDS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    EDS is an interesting one, one of the first parasites living off open source. Back in the old days, the US government mandated that federal government-funded software would be open source, ie the taxpayers paid for it, they should be able to get a copy of it. EDS got government money to create software to make payments for Department of Agriculture, then for Medicare, and yet it never released its source codes, but turned them into very profitable proprietary systems. This was a great swindle (ie successful use of lawyers and political influence) of the taxpayers, producing for Perot an income of about $1 million per week for the next 20 years, back when that was real money. Should never have happened according to the intended results of the rules in effect. Before Perot, no one tried to make big bucks in software. IBM gave it away if you bought a computer, and business freely shared all kinds of codes without much selfishness of applications.