O-STEP In The Limelight

Tony Stanco, whose new eGovOS conference is starting today, has also been pushing O-STEP (Open Source Threshold Escrow Program). It's an interesting looking program for escrowing code, pending money being raised towards it - you can get more details in PPT,OpenOffice, and HTML.

Comments

Re:Legitimizing Open Source

[tcort]

>Everyone wants to get paid for their work
People are already getting paid for open source and free software. It is possible! Companies and non-profits are making money by

• selling the software for a price
• providing a support service
• customizing the software for customers
• selling manuals
• providing training
• selling promo material (t-shirts)

A good idea, with some problems

[Mr. Shiny And New]

I've thought of this idea before; it seems somewhat reasonable but there are some problems. For example, what if the escrow value is set too high? What if only a few people buy it? What happens to bug-fixes and updates?

I can imagine a few things going wrong in this system where the buyer of the software is harmed. The example in the article about Corel escrowing Word Perfect is a good one: What happens if they set the escrow value at $50M but only sell $40M of software? Then the early adopters lose out, since now they are stuck with a product as proprietary as MS Word, but not as popularly supported. I think that for this reason, many products will not be purchased until they have some serious momentum. This is a catch-22.

Another issue, as another poster mentioned, is that software that begins its life as proprietary can not build upon the free software foundations. The other main problem is that some software can't be open-sourced because it includes other proprietary components that are licensed, not bought. So, for the free-software community there is still an advantage (more free code, even if it's missing bits, is still good), but for the people who bought the software in escrow there is less advantage, since they can't actually use the opened source for their production work.

Re:Bullshit. Write software - get paid for softwar

[IamTheRealMike]

The two aren't mutually exclusive - I know some people who find people for whom an open source product is 95% of what they want, then get hired to make it 100%. That falls under the customisation aspect I'd guess, though "customisation" makes it sound like you'd spend all your time sticking company logos on the software, in reality that's not true.

And if you think about it, getting paid for what people actually *need* as opposed to what you think they'll need is more efficient anyway.