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Commercializing Open Source Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the market-realities dept.

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.'"

2 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. An opinion by Vexalith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. it's really easy by dcordeiro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :)