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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.

1 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.