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Commercializing Open Source Software
CowboyRobot writes "Michael Karels, system architect for BSD 4.3 and 4.4, has an article on ACM Queue about the challenges in trying to make money from open source software. From the article: 'As users of the software, open source contributors have certain common interests in making the software stable and usable.' but 'When additions require modifications to the base system, there may be resistance to incorporating the changes.'"
The only way that companies are really going to make big money off open-source is to in a sense, drop open source. As long as they can sell something that can't be given away(such as the Finder in OS X), there's money to be made. Otherwise, they'll sell support contracts here and there, but no company is going to make it in to the "big time" with just support; even IBM has other buisnesses.
A number of users have suggested that I charge for custom work, but when I ask them if they would ever pay for cutom work, the answer is always no.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I think offering Subscribtion services is about the best way to make money with open source (Transgaming, Lindows, Slashdot?, even tech support).
many free programs pay off for the developers because they charge for support. without proper support software is often not worth considering for many organisations, so that's a convenient way to raise funds for further development. Even more i don't think that making certain changes for money is a bad idea (as long as it doesn't compromise other parts of the program or makes it incompatible to prior versions), for all of the users will profit from it, the buyer gets what he wants and the developers get money they need to further develop the program.
".Sig Stealer" was here
The problem comes in the nature of the beast. It's like art really. Artists perform their art because it makes them feel good to share. And they want everyone to be in on it. The same can be said of Open Source. People code Open Source cause they want to not only create something for themselves, but to give it to the world. The problem comes in, about the same time as it hits the artist, when they want to put more time and energy behind their creation. They start to realize that the only way to dedicate more of their lives to this brain child of theirs they can't be bothered by things as mundane as work, or bills. The only solution is to make their brain child their job!! But because of things like the GPL, they've effectivly shot themselves in the foot. They can no longer sell their brain child. They can't even offer it for a measly $20 unless there's something else they can give with it. Thusly the support angle. Why do people go out and pay $60 for a copy of Red Hat when they can download .iso's or do an FTP install? Because if they pay, there's some guy who's sitting by a phone, and he's perfectly willing to help them when they fuck it up. If more OSS coders went non-OSS, and offered the source to purchasers through some new liscencing system the OSS movement would die though. I didn't say I had a solution, only that I think I have some insight as to the problem.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
Perhaps we shouldn't be trying to commercialise OSS. Perhaps we should be trying to commercialise the businesses and products/services which rely on OSS.
For example if I set up a cybercafe and write some software to deal with scheduling and billing, I'm not looking to make money from it. Instead I'm looking to make money from the business that relies on it. Providing a service is what is going to make me the money, and by opening the source of my billing software I may find a wealth of people willing to help me improve it and to use it themselves in other commercial products which pay their bills (and not mine). I get free upgrades and enhancements and they get the basis of a product that runs their business.
It's just an idea, and I'm no economist, but I have a feeling that this sort of set-up could work in many situations.
The key is educating companies in to believing that it's their (civic?) duty to contribute back to the OSS products they use. For example, if every business that uses Linux and has more than 1000 employees were to donate the time of one employee to improving Linux (working full time in the OSS community), we'd see pretty rapid improvement. People are begining to catch on (IBM, Red Hat...), but more of the same would be nice, IMVHO.
1 - develop a application ( you know how to do it, no ?
:)
:)
2 - try to "sell it" to as manny organizations as you can (for free).
3 - Make a contract with those organizations (for maintenance, bugfix, feature add)
4 - make it available to the world as open source.
What the organizations get:
1 - A "free" software. Maybe not the best there is, but sometimes they need months to decide on what to use (because it costs a lot of monney), but they need something now. There comes your program. And believe it or not, most times, your program will be the "final one".
2 - Direct contact with the developper
3 - A rapid deployment.
4 - Low risk (if you don't charge much for your software
What you get:
1 - costumers !!!
2 - flat fee revenue (aka you know what you're going to get in the end of the month)
3 - going open source enlarges your app "possible customers" universe.
4 - You can still get lot more customers with onsite or remote support for instalation, bugfixing, feacture adds.
What the world gets:
1 - Open Source Software
2 - open source software development backup up with real money.
I adopted this in the last 3 years, and its working great
Keep the core of the OS opensource, and make a really nice GUI that closed, and is really what your paying for. Now if Apple made a nice GUI for Linux, and sold it, now that would be awsome, but it would jeprodize their PPC sales.
I've always thought that ghostscript had a neat idea in that the latest version is released under a different license and older versions are GPL'd. Why not charge for the most recent version with the newest features and release old versions with lesser functionality than the current as free and maybe even in the public domain. If there's not money to be made on old outdated software, why not release it free and open source? Sure, you might make a few less dollars, but you'll make yourself a lot of new customers in the process, too. I know there's always shareware, but it tends to be severely crippled and has a 30 day time limit on it. The point is, charge for the newest major features, and release older and fully funtional versions to the public free and open sourced.
people have been trained to do two things with software, purchase and steal. i cannot begin to tell you how many requests i get for office or windows cd's from people who don't wish to pay for it. fact is, mainstream computarded L-users feel better when they've shelled something out for the software, even if it is free. like carnies, we have to take advantage of the marks, because they ask for it, and wouldn't be entertained otherwise.
beyond that, i wish that lycoris would put OO.O on their distro, just so i could hand out disks of their stuff and not tell anyone what they're getting, let them use the stuff and be happy, like the most illiterate of my clients who get free software every time they ask for a crack.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
What if someone goes and releases your old software, with added functionality, as a derivative work and starts making a profit off of it? It could be a bad business decision to do so. That's one place where shared source (Microsoft's license) gets it right. It's not really open source, but you still can see the code you're running. Perhaps allow it to be released non-commercially, but not sold for a profit. You can't just release it open, though, most likely. Perhaps the GPL would work here, but I think restricting commercial derivative works is certainly necessary to make it possible.
Yes but red hat makes their money off of other peoples work. In fact they are part of the problem, the coders that worte the software contained in the Red hat Dist have to compete now with red hat for "services", and redhat didn't have to write the software. Red hat and the other distrubutions are examples of free loaders, they do no or very little work, and they suck up the service contracts that would have gone to the coders of the individual projects.
My feelings are that if you want to make money on software, don't release it open source. Many times you just add a little bit to an existing open source project any way, and don't care to make money off of that small amount of work. When lots of people add bit and pieces then you have a big project.
The money is in integrating the things and making it work for people.
The other money is in CUSTOMIZING. People have a demand for stuff that works only for their situation, and demands an in-person presence that indians (in india, that is) cannot satisfy.
There's not a huge profit margin in selling commercial packages anyway, but about the same amount of time is spent making them work. SELL YOUR TIME!
(Don't buy the commercial vendors "TCO" arguments..)
Most of my clients are all too happy to get away from "license" payments. They want to spend money for actual value, and a "license" isn't an actual value, other than for the "privilege" of running a software package.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
The open source process is inherently social and political. Group leaders spend as much time on organizational matters and conflict resolution as on technical issues. When members cannot agree, the groups sometimes split into different factions. This may result in potentially competitive projects with different approaches, and possibly redundant efforts in both groups.
I actually see this as a potentially good thing. In then end, the OS project that lives is the one that more people have agreed upon and supported. I think disagreements are a fact of life, and in a way Open Source provides its own judicial system through Freshmeat's reverse popularity search.
The only place I see it as not so good is in the incompatibilities between distros. While we all like to find the one that fits our personalities best, I think in some ways it has been both a stigma to outsiders. Still, most software included in distros can be found in source and made to work on your favorite flavor. Not something for the newbie or grandma, but at least its possible.
I'm curous how the rest of you view the potential of OS projects to fork... Positive, or negative?