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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.'"
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
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.
Money can help affect political change, and when coders pass on the chance to make money, they also pass on the chance to affect political change.
Obviously you can still make a change without money, but it's quite a lot easier if you have some.
As I see it, when coders are giving their work away for free for professional use by international companies, they are being had.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
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
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.