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How Can Companies Profit While Giving Code Away?
An anonymous reader writes "In an almost philosophical essay replete with references to everyone from Larry Lessig and Tim Bray to to Professor Yochai Benkler, Sun Micrososystems evangelist Simon Phipps explores the metaphor of subscription (well, of course it's not just a metaphor any more from Sun's point of view) as the way that companies will make money off of deploying open source solutions. His distinction between OS developer and OS deployer is useful, but the crux is his contention that, with a "system" such as Sun has put together like the JDS, 'You don't buy the software from Sun - instead you subscribe to the editorial outlook.' It's an alluring analogy - Sun as the editor-in-chief of a 'publication' (JDS) with readers who may or may not choose to subscribe. Worth reading."
It's obviously a trickle-down theory... making easy to customize apps allows workers to gain productivity.
Sun preaches subscription as a opensource model.. when are they going to acknowledge and treat the gpl right in their subscription?
its kind of hypocritical to proclaim opensource when misss treating the Licneses of the code tha tyou use..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
But let's not forget newspapers make their money off the ads.
'You don't buy the software from Sun - instead you subscribe to the editorial outlook.'
Is this kind of like how Casino's give away complemetary rooms and gifts to their biggest gamblers?
People ask how we make a profit, I'll tell you...
Volume
Just use the argument for mp3's. When Sun goes on its 'tour', 'arenas' will sellout to see 'live' code
- I got my free iPod and a free Nintendo DS....why not
Seems we already have a few models of this.
The software is free but you pay for the CD it's on and tech support.
I like muppets.
Advertising. Giving code away would give software the attributes of free-to-air broadcast media. And given that software usually needs regular updates for bug fixes, downloading would be more than just a one-time affair. Free-to-air broadcast media revenue comes from advertising. And although general advertising doesn't guarantee the audience will have any interest, the type of software being downloaded will give a better idea of what kinds of ads would interest their downloading demographic.
It's very simple: nobody reads the license. I made some money by selling an open source app (of which I am the maintainer). I also sell it, and include the source code. Yes I'm actually able to sell it, even though it can be downloaded for free.
The fact is, nobody reads the license. I include the source and the GPL. The GPL only gives the user more freedom. But nobody reads the GPL! Most don't even know they're allowed to distribute it, or even resell it.
what makes the community do what they do? (what my boss always asks, even though he loves OS products).
That's how a "subscription" company makes money, but how is the community sustained through governance? I realize these are rather wide open questions, but encouraging discussion enlightens us all.
Sig it.
and get people to pay for hardware and services
use your expertise to help get the software customised - and no you won't get priced out of the market by "small developers" because there will be no monolithic company behind the software, only small developers. The GPL is anti-corporation, pro small-business.
And have a commodity hardware market with open drivers, so the distinguishing point is quality and price of hardware. No special software packs, no tie ins, no incompatabilities.
IBM benefits from helping linux because they sell hardware and they sell services. But sooner or later they will be squeezed out too, because corporations can't move fast enough.
This is a good thing. It returns us to what capitalism is all about, hardware trading on equitable terms (no lock-ins) and service trading without mega corps. It is pure capitalism.
The future just happened, although there are a few people who don't know that yet.
The reproduction of hardware costs a lot, while the reproduction of software costs very little. People often make a success of things that ignore reality, but they rarely do so with things that are directly opposed to reality.
Simple, just follow step number 2:
???
After that, profit is inevitable!
Lot's of people talk about the subscription model and it's benefits. Often compared to a magazine subscription. The difference is that back issues of magazines still continue to work, unlike some subscriptions of software that have time-bomb unlock codes. I think the subscription model is a bad idea for consumers.
At least in the case of complicated software like ERP, you can make as or more in the support services area as the customer ever paid for initial software.
The win-win philosophy underlying the Sun statements is good; that is, it's true that Sun can make money by operating as 'editor in chief' of a suite of freeware applications. However, I don't buy into the statement that open source doesn't mainly benefit from having many hands involved. Making the best people the 'committers' of projects is important but nowhere in the article does anyone mention how much good software is created and maintained by people not previously recognized as 'best' for the job. The process doesn't work the way the Sun statement implies.
Service Providers (hosting, ASP, ISP, VoIP, etc.) can make money by charging for their services while giving code away. An open source service provider will attract more customers because they are not dealing with a black box (a white box?), they will provide better services because bugs will be fixed faster, they will have more loyal customers, especially those that are actively involved with the product; And if other companies use their code and compete, better service as opposed to more obscurity will result.
If i understand them correctly i believe that Gentoo and Lin(spire|dows) are pushing the same sort of model.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
There is so much good open source software out there (my most recent find was a sweet little bookkeeping package called Lazy8 ledger) that gets very little promotion. I'd guess that there are many, many useful packages and programs that if I knew about I'd use. So I can see significant value in "editing" open source into useful groups. Also, I've long thought that it would be nice to see a "starter's" edition of Linux that reduced the choices of packages available to the "best" pieces of software. Nothing against vi and EMACS ed and the others, but does a first time user really need to choose between 12 or more text editors (or two desktop environments or three office suites, etc). I realize there are tremendous advantages to having diverse software offerings, but it's not as useful for the first time user.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
... perhaps because that is the business model he knows best?
Posters recognized by their sig,
This model is very compelling for the commercial market -- companies know that they will both want customization and will need support for their software. They are willing to pay for expert assistance and 7x24 access to services. Enterprise software and support can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat - providing plenty of revenues to offset the labor costs of support can customization.
But the consumer market is very different. The consumer market has very low retail prices that can't support the high cost of labor - a $49.95 price point product can go from profit to loss on a single tech support call. This consumer market consists of two segments -- geeks who don't need support and the clueless who needs lots of expensive support. Currently, proprietary software makers can earn a profit, in aggregate, because they capture money from both the geek and clueless segments. They may lose money on the clueless, but that make up for it on the geeks who don't need support.
In a FOSS environment, the geeks can go for the free downloads and do-it-themselves when it comes to deployment, customization, and support of FOSS. Geeks have little reason to pay for FOSS-related services. This leaves only the labor-intensive clueless expecting to get a year of support for their $49.95. But because they are clueless, they will use more that $49.95 of support labor (even if that labor is in India).
The trick with these services models is finding people that are both willing to pay for service but that don't actually need to use the service that much. Its a very good model for corporate IT, but I don't see how the numbers can work on the consumer side. Perhaps someone in tech support has numbers for the statistical distribution of the percentages of people that use X-minutes of support.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
IBM has realized this, and is building up their services business around this model, and it would be great if companies like Sun join the fray, to keep the competition there.
I also liked the portion of the essay where he talks about being able to pull together all of the components yourself, and support it yourself, or to pay someone else to support it for you. The first part of that is why I used OSS, and the 2nd part is what is currently lacking to make OSS more generally accepted. While there are people that will need support, there are some of us that just want the choice, freedom and flexibility, and OSS seems to be the best way to provide both right now.
This is not an original idea - even in the software world.
Microsoft for many years has already sold countless subscriptions to their MSDN.
Of course the OS is, itself, a subscription with 'issues' every 2-3 years..
95, 98, 2000, etc..
How to make money on 'free' software.
Charge for support.
(You want me to tell you how to use the software, then pay me).
Charge to become a member of the stearing group. (you want development to go this way then pay me).
Charge for features, and non critical bug fixes. (you want that, then pay me)
I think support should be by Open FAQ's, you have to pay to get someone to look at your problem, but as soon as the solutions posted everyone can view it.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Really, they're coming around to Apples's position -- given a situation where the open-source world has a lot and one's company has a little, throwing in with the crowd is a sound strategy. When the company has a lot and open-source has a little, best to keep what you have.
Meanwhile, I'd never heard of Benkler until this week, when he wrote an inane essay in Science about how research should be "open-source". If you took the most witless comments here about how if a distributed group can write software, then, logically any subject about which one knows nothing can obviously be done efficiently by a distributed group -- that's basically what it was.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The only time you could enforce it (which would be what the advertisers who pay you to show their adverts will require) is during the download time. Giving the source away means that folks will disable any pop-ups or the like pretty fast. With no guarantee to advertisers that anyone will see the add except for those updates, which you will probably have to force just so folks will see the advertisements, won't entice advertisers to give you much money to advertise for them.
Advertisers pay for exposure... the more exposure, the more money they pay. If you can't guarantee them any exposure, they won't pay.
Let's also not forget, as someone who works for a newspaper, that it's not easy to make money in the newspaper business at all. The whole industry seems to be feeling the pinch these days.
"When I quit my job because my boss is an asshole, I called the maker of this software I know they pirated. The guy who answered the phone laughed so hard it sounded like he was going to die, then hung up. What the hell?"
*grin*
If you take a look at what Sun is currently charging for the Java Desktop, it just doesn't make financial sense at the current price point. I for one don't expect to see companies switching to a subscription model that charges $100 per system per year (granted the current pricing until December 2, 2004 is $50). To be competitive and offer the business community a truly compelling reason to switch to the Java Desktop, the price is going to need to come down just a bit more.
What might be a motivating factor for a company to purchase a product using the subscription model, support perhaps? Well they do give you 60 days of support but the remaining 305 days of the year support will cost extra.
-- Just my $0.02 worth...
None of the information I provide for my employer is secret. It's all out there buried like a needle in a haystack. My employer is always welcome to fire me but somebody has to find the needle and the haystack is very big. If you're not as big as IBM, paying somebody to provide you with the good stuff on a silver platter is way more profitable than trying to dig out the stuff yourself.
The emphasis here is on incentive.
Just something to ponder. Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
I dont think that is the only way. There was an article a while back on the different business models around OS and there were some good examples that were not advertising.
One way, which my company is doing it is by giving away source code of components that plug in to our services system. What you are really buying from us is infrastructure, management, and time.
We are expecting that many people will build their own systems but that is OK, we dont need to be a monopoly, we just have to offer value to customers such that the say its worth the money.
>>Sun can make money by operating as 'editor in chief' of a suite of freeware applications.
Of course, when a group of university students in Sweden or Germany or (God Forbid!) China decide that they want to work together and editor-in-chief Sun's freeware applications, for free just 'cuz, and make some great admin tools, then Sun is going to have a cattle drive (instead of just a cow).
> The process doesn't work the way the Sun statement implies.
Exactly. If I were Sun, I would give money to fledging open-source projects. It's amazing how much goodwill a $500 paypal donation will generate on a one-man project.
For example. Python operated "under the radar" for many years. Now, there's street recognition (not much, but some) but it's now too late for outside parties to influence or even buy Python.
Likewise there are many projects out there that could become just revolutionary yet are completely ignored by Sun and the like. The people in these projects toil in darkness, stressing about money and relationships, gritting their teeth as their pre-alpha api takes shape on their sub-par hardware. If a company or three came and said: We believe in what you are doing, and here's a $1,000, keep up the good work and post progress to your blog, we'll check it out regularly; then said developer would remember said company as an early benefactor and would just have a warm feeling for them for years to come.
BTW, Johnathan Schwartz' weblog is interesting, except maybe a little paternalistic.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Not the whole package needs to be given away for free. Companies can give away the core, and charge for useful add-ons. This way they will gain the market share, and still manage to profit from customers who want and need more.
Companies can also place their products in a way that allows them to provide per-customer consulting, customization, system integration, etc. The company's employees should be THE experts for doing this, so they could easily have the advantage over 'generic' consulting companies.
Those are just some of the ideas.
Simpy
I still get an uneasy feeling from parts of this essay. The link between community governance and control of the commit authority is played up a little too much for my comfort. Open source has a fallback mechanism for users/customers who are unhappy: the code fork. This is one way in which the analogy with newspapers is a bit week. A newspaper is ephemeral, the stories change every day. A "fork" doesn't make sense. Sure you can make your own by going to base news sources, but you can't re-use the mechanical bits that make up the NYTimes layout or the website. If you tried to my a MYTimes that re-cycled the NYTimes content directly, you would certainly be violating their terms of use and copyright.
This article gives me the impression that Sun is still clinging to control of the commit mechanism as a way to exercise ultimate authority over the community. In contrast, if you read interviews with Linus Torvalds, he is usually very careful to express how limited his control is, downplaying the fact that he holds the ulimate "commit" keys, and emphasizing that his true power comes from the amount of respect he has earned (and is able to sustain) from his fellow kernel developers.
the whole idea is that you give something away... but not EVERYTHING... or.. at least you eventually charge for something. for example, people spend countless hours creating animations and videos for the internet, only to give it away for free...just to generate hype. is this any different? speaking of that, what you really should be doing-- rather than thinking about or discussing this topic-- is riding bmx bicycles. Videos and Pictures of people riding BMX bicycles[bmx.zensky.com] have fun and don't eat poop.
Our company, profits selling hardware, while most of our engineering effort goes towards our open source software, SlimServer. The open source part of our business has helped us build an great community of users. Some of our users don't buy the hardware but contribute nonetheless, making our hardware, Squeezebox, more useful and valuable to the folks who do buy. It's a business model that's working for us right now.
Software companies are not the only companies which write software. I defy anyone to show me a company with over 50 employees which doesn't use some kind of home-brewed software somewhere in its operations (and, yes, I mean other than HTML content). This is especially the case in scientific research, where if the budget's tight and a needed tool is either nonexistent or too expensive, the answer is "Write your own." I work for the bioinformatics department of a biotech firm, where I am paid to write free software.
Up until recently, that's been free as in beer; we have a suite of DNA development apps that we provide as web services, so our clients are doing their research with our cycles instead of shelling out $4000 a seat for a closed-source solution. Lately, however, I've been working on a tool (for site-directed mutagenesis, if anyone really cares) which will be both integrated into the web toolkit and released as a stand-alone GPLed app. The legal department's behind it. I am stoked beyond comprehension.
But does this work? Oh hell yeah, if you go by the bottom line and by the number of calls my boss gets every week from bioinfo startups trying to convince him to provide 45-day free-trial downloads of their software on our site. (Use our bandwidth to promote your closed-source code? I don't think so, bitch.) Obviously, people could visit the site (the tool suite doesn't require registration or anything like that), design a primer, then order it from one of our competitors, and I'm sure some people do; but why bother when there's a convenient, unobtrusive "Order now" button just below your results? I'm sure we could sell our software, but in the long run, the customer goodwill we build up (along with the increased orders) by providing this for free is more important to the CEO than whatever short-term quick bucks we could squeeze out by hawking SciTools. In the end, providing free software is the game-winning solution.
I'm sure this can't be the only example of a situation where this tactic works, though I haven't given a lot of thought to where else it would be appropriate. Hmm, maybe I should post this as an Ask Slashdot.
Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like you're in the shower. Fuck like you're being filmed.
Advertisers pay for exposure... the more exposure, the more money they pay. If you can't guarantee them any exposure, they won't pay.
The type of software being downloaded can help tailor advertising for the downloading demographic. People downloading software for servers may be interested in server hardware or accessories like a UPS or rackmount keyboard or display. People downloading website development software like PHP may be interested in credit card transaction processing services. With that kind of a setup, people may actually want to see the advertising, compared to television, where the advertising is too broad.
And with the click-through nature of internet advertising, advertisers can pay per click-though viewing and purchases, rather than paying a flat rate. You don't have to guarantee anything, because if they don't get anyone through click-through browsing, then they don't have to pay anything, as opposed to the television/radio model where they pay first.
Lacking in this common phrase is a sense that money is being earned. Lacking is a sense of exchange of some tangible goods or valuable service in exchange for the money. Often even an expectation of work performed for or responsibility to customers is absent. Money will simple be made "off of" something... usually intangible intellectual property.
So, dear reader (if you've endured my little rant so far), please keep an eye out for this phrase. Is it usually used in a context devoid of striving to satisfy customers? Or am I just reading to much into it? If so, I'm sure you'll reply to let me know :-)
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Sun Micrososystems evangelist Simon Phipps explores the metaphor of subscription (well, of course it's not just a metaphor any more from Sun's point of view) as the way that companies will make money off of deploying open source solutions.
This is not the way free/open source software should be approached, IMO. Nobody is going to make much money by trying to sell something that users can get for free. You can sell a service based on the software but that's about it.
The way to approach free software is for the big users of software (i.e., corporations) to form software development consortiums whose sole reason for being is to develop open software for its members. The cost of development should be shared among the members of the consortium. Of course, if you're not a paying member, you don't get the timely updates and you don't get the informed support. You have to wait until they make it out to general public. Just an idea.
Cooperation is always better than competition. Let us be humane toward members of our own species for a change.
There was an article a while back on the different business models around OS and there were some good examples that were not advertising.
That sounds interesting. Got a link to the article?
Yes, I would pay for a free software subscription. I even occasionally click on google ads while searching to buy a particular item. But it would be a long time before I spend $299 that I might pay for a complex app that really meets my needs. Yes you can make money from side business if software itself is free, but probably not enough to cover writting software in the first place. Perhaps enough to cover distribution and minor bug fixes.
Of course support can be expensive, but that's only for corporate customers, and even then many free apps can be "supported" by googling for info. What kind of questions about Firefox are worth $100 a pop?
Let's just accept that most free software is written as a hobby, as an academic project or for personal use. Linus didn't set out to make great riches, and as far as I know he didn't. If you are trying to make money off either free or pay software that other people are willing to write and maintain as a hobby, well you should have known better.
My paper this morning was copyrighted.
Just a thought.
Does this essay seem like probing to anyone else?
By that I mean, it's like the essay was written to see exactly how much we're willing to spend on software. Further it seems to want us to answer in what method we prefer the pricing to be structured.
Anyway, for my two cents on profiting while giving the code away:
scott king
Ick. Either there's something hideously wrong with the Sun logo gif or my glasses have fallen off.
I wrote something similar yesterday...
Sometime in the 1940's Nestle approached Mrs. Ruth Wakefield, the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie, and purchased her recipe. After purchasing it, they gave it away by printing it on every bag of chocolate chips.
Why would they do this? They PAID for that recipe! Why would they turn it around and GIVE it away?
Nestle was not in the business of selling cookbooks, and they were not a restraunt. They are (among other things) in the business of selling chocolate.
By giving away that recipe, they gave everyone a reason to buy chocolate chips. They couldn't patent the recipe (recipes aren't patentable), but they DID trademark the name "Nestle Tollhouse Cookies". Today, that is a brand that makes a considerable amount of money selling chocolate chips, selling prefab cookie dough, and selling cookies in shopping malls.
Why would someone pay a dollar for a cookie at a store in the mall whenthey could make that same cookie for 20 cents? Convenience.
So, people make money off of open source by providing the goods necessary to USE the open source, by providing services around the open source product, AND by turning it into a recognizable BRAND (ala Red Hat).
This is not a new business model - it is actually very old. People just think of it as new because of the huge impact it has had in recent history in a new market.
I'm starting to think that there is a symbiotic relationship that exists between propriety vendors and Open Source. It seems to me that this model works provided the technical team you need is pretty small (the mark-up you can charge for "editorial" is pretty small too). If the whole world goes open source then the total number of developers surely has to reduce as well. And what you have left is fewer developers available to work for free so the amount of open source development that can happen reduces also. Most big open source projects survive because their major contributors earn money working for proprietary vendors. Others (like Mono) survive because a proprietary vendor funds them. So what happens if there are no proprietary vendors left?
i always seem to compare the open source movement, to the independent music scene..
a lot of the times, artists promote their band, or work, by giving it away for free. what better way to get your name out there, than to just give everyone a taste of what you got goin on..
one way or another, the artist, still fulfills their goal, gets recognized for it, and manages to make a buck or two in the process, even though they don't hit major MTV rockstardom.
independent musicians in particular, aren't what you would call mainstream artists.. neither is anything open source.. its nothing compared to an operating system in which 90% of computer users, use...
same goes for music.. that 10% of elitests, usually have some pretty damn good taste.. wether its in music, or choice of OS..
eventually, after years of hardwork, striving to accomplish your passion, it always happens.. you fulfill it.. you end up, or even die, being happy.. so money, shmoney.. the open source movement was created for a morally good reason.. and it will succeed wether the programmers and companies that donate their time make money or not.
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
Sorry, you called me out on my laziness ;-) It took a bit to find it, it was posted on slashdot a while back, here is the article:
IT Managers Journal
The other thing is to use things like Newsletters to distribute update information.
I used to get a newsletter from a company which told me about any updates to a free component I used and also updates to their commercial components. I later bought one of their commercial products.
what makes the community do what they do?
Because that's how they get the tools they want.
The company I work for provides specialized web services (intranet sites, etc.) The software we use is GPL'ed. Both my employer and I have contributed code to this software.
It costs nothing to contribute (we would have written the code anyway), and we get back *way* more than we put into it. That's why we do what we do - because we get something back (better software.)
The bottom line is, they often won't. Businesses just don't want to muck around getting a free piece of software and then finding someone to configure it. They want black box solutions as a rule, particularly if the price is quite cheap.
For some reason, this article made me think of the pie selling contest in Revenge of the Nerds. Where they put a special surprise underneath the pie.
Yes, this is exactly the sort of support that makes an incredible difference. I work in a scientific research environment -- where we use tons of little apps shared by user bases sometimes in the single digits -- and a little support goes a long, long way. The idea of Sun supporting university/student developers with token amounts of money is probably pie-in-the-sky but it would be wonderful if it ever happens. Even used hardware donations would provide a boost. P.S. I hadn't seen the Jonathan Schwartz blog -- interesting comment about Red Hat making the cost of switching OSes high.
Insecure.org retains ALL copyright to all nmap code, regardless of the original author. This allows them to release it under the GPL for general use, and also to sell it for big bucks under a closed source license to security companies who want to make it a component of their products without the GPL's "viral" licensing requirements. Nmap gets a sweetheart deal: their community of users helps build their tool, so they get free development and testing in return for shared use of their product, but they retain all profit rights.
So while this guy is writing an essay, insecure.org is actually doing it.
...but could they please say how much of their profit was from this type of business plan? I would wager that they made absolutely nothing from it.
People who can get things for free are not going to pay for it. You pay for something you need, something that adds value, something you cannot get elsewhere for free, or cheaper.
As with most technical magazines, they've found that they are losing money because people can just Google for answers. They don't need a print solution every month/week, they need an instant answer right now, with commentary.
Well, I havn't seen many good apps that get to version 1 and then stagnate.
Maybe someone would pay you to do some more development because they like the
app?
And unless the help is blinding, your always going to need support, 'I tried to install it on my pokamon but it didn't work'.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This is that easy:
1. Write code that nobody will be able to run/fix/maintain on their own, provide very little documentation (ever heard of development and program management specs?)
2. Give the code away for free
3. Profit from the support contracts your customers will inevitably need
Same way Gillette and Shick do. Give away the razor and sell people the blades. In software, sell the support (or the updates, or whatever).
The newspaper isn't the source silly.
The articles are the source. And they fork all the time from different news sources.
did you even bother to read this commentary?
"Volume"
Say 100 companies all chip in a percentage of what they would've paid on license fees to improving OpenOffice with features they want. Yes, it costs them some money and yes, some other companies will get the benefit of those improvements for free. But they still save a ton of $$ and don't have to keep paying and paying and paying like you do with Microcrapware.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Not only "not all developers work for software companies" - the MAJORITY of developers don't work for software companies.
The VAST VAST majority of software is written by in-house (or contracted) IT staff supporting some other sort of business - banking, manufacturing, transportation etc etc etc. The people writing software for direct sale are far and away the minority.
With the possible exception of games, the whole concept of "software for sale" is an abberation that FOSS is (slowly but inexorably) correcting.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Ever hear of Smokey Yunick? He was big time when I was a kid. Famous nascar mechanic and auto editor of popular science? Not some unknown inventor that someone's cousin heard someones nephew talking abouty in 1897, nope, a pretty famous dude. He built some engines and stuck them in some cars back in the 80's that were fantastic. If dee-troit (corporations, to get to the point) had followed his lead cars would be getting twice the mileage they are today, maybe more.
Here is an url that has a lot of links relating to him and his inventions.
http://schou.dk/hvce/
little copy/paste from one of the links off that first page:
"Did you happen to hear about "Smokey" Henry Yunick's adiabatic engine? He holds several patents related to the article I saw in the April 1983 issue of Popular Science. He managed to get 150 Hp and 60 MPG out of a 78 ci. 2 cyl motor. The article even goes on to say that one of the "detroit boys" were donating a car (chassis) to him for testing. Of course you've never heard about this since. Check out patent #4,862,859 and his related patents."
I have a photocopy of this issue, shows the car, etc, and had a full write up. It was a normal VW model, sorry , forget which one, but a normal for the time commuter car. It was the cover story that month. And the car didn't overheat, in fact it ran so efficiently that it ran quite cool. 150 horse and 60 mpg, not bad for in the 80s.
AFAIK now, been awhile since I read about it, GM offered him a paltry 250 grand for his patents, he laughed at them and went back to professional racing, because he knew it was worth a lot more.
As to software and patents and computer hardware, who knows if advanced software had been open sourced a long time ago. I hear guys here to this day claim amiga was killer good OS for instance, years ahead of anything else in a lot of aspects. I never used it myself, just I know it's been priased here over and over again.
Patents and copyrights are good and bad. I have no doubt they need to be reassessed though, especially patenting intangibles like software, I think that's just silly and counterproductive to long term advances.
You are talking about paying for commercial software in a business environment. It's probably cheaper to have you download a free VB.Net date control and spend an hour figuring out how to use it than paying for support and having you spend time talking to them.
:-)
Now imagine playing with your PC at home and a choice between paying $100 or spending the evening manually installing and configuring free software. If you value your time that much, just let me know and I will be happy to assist with your computer difficulties
The model works always, as long as you provide a useful service to the customer at a price he's willing to afford.
Sorry but Raffaello's point, "This model only works if there is no competition in your tiny market niche", is correct. I can take you GPL'd code and offer to maintain and support it for less. And I should always be able to undercut you. I only need to cover my support costs while you need to cover both support and the initial development. Thank you for researching the market, establishing the market, and building the market to an interesting size.
That isn't the way Gillette and Schick do it.
In fact, you have to pay $14 for the Gillette M3 Power razor. Here are some prices: http://www.drugstore.com/templates/stdplist/defau
The Schick razors also aren't cheap: http://www.drugstore.com/templates/stdplist/defau
Last time I checked, $14 and $8.31 aren't "free" in any sense of the word.
Imagine that: You have to pay more for a stupid razor than for software.
'Ultimately, as population grows and greed runs rampant, the commons collapses and ends in "the tragedy of the commons"' (Garrett Hardin, Science 162:1243, 1968).
That is what will happen to OSS as more and more commercial companies build mechanisms to profit from the OSS work of others. Remember, that Sun or any other public company holds primary concern for the shareholders, not the "community".
On one hand PC and review magazines get outdated very quickly. Those old coverdisks age quite quickly over the years.
On the other hand, "Euroboy" and "Freshmen" magazines in theory work fine for several years... until the hairstyles or underwear become embarrassing to look at (and you really don't want to look at 70s pr0n magazines).
They can't. Implementors can.
you wrote:
Modified you get this:
Item 1 in the first case is really a moot point, as most Open Source Software that is used commercially is documented quite sufficiently or at least as well as the for-sale software. In the second case, it costs you more. Because you are paying for both the support package and the code (that you cannot modify)
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
He's dead now. And he wanted them to PRODUCE it, not just shelve it, which I think he thought they would do, both from low balling him on the offer,and also from what he knew about past detroit track records with consumer cars. You got to understand, he was an outstanding engineer, he knew first hand daily how bad detroit iron was then, all he did was improve on it constantly to get it to reliable racing specs. And it's not like they didn't know, the original "planned obsolesence" came from detroit. Think about it from the maximum profits crowd, do you make more selling a new car every 100 to 200 thou miles,(less usually) or if you sold million mile cars that only cost 50% more to manufacture? And if you are an uberfatcat who sells cars and also got a big hand in the selling gas and oil market, do you really want high mileage cars? It's simple math to them, that's why I used this example to go along with the corporate condemening, pure profit capitalism does not always result in the best stuff, it usually results in the barely good enough quality being sold for the very most the market can bear. Hmm, I guess this being slasherdot I'll say MS is another example there.
Another thing about his engines, they had normal carbs, he didn't even need fuel injection to get what he was getting.
Anyway, this subject comes up occassionally and I usually drop a link to it. It's because I remember reading the magazine at the time and thinking "cool, good mileage and goodf performance cars around the corner". Back then you got one or the other, not both at the same time. Now it's two DECADES later and they are struggling to reproduce what he had then, and they have to do it with computerised fuel injection and variable computer controlled ignition and whatnot. His was all mechanical, he just followed normal thermodynamic principles combined with very good quality machining. Racing tech applied to commuter cars. The stuff we have offered to us now is a horror show of rube goldberg overly complicated profit generators more than anything else.
It is neither capitalism nor corporations that are the problem. Rather it is *monopoly* capitalism that is the problem. The freer the markets to all comers, the better overall for society. Too much concentration of wealth or power is always a Bad Thing. How much is too much? I can't define it but I know it when I see it.
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
Since it doesn't actually exist.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
To make a profit you have to make an income greater than your expenses. Your total gross earnings must exceed your costs.
There are many ways to make money as a GPL using company. You can:
a) Sell the software in a box on a store shelf.
b) Sell the software on CD from an online order form.
c) Sell the software or ask for donations online via PayPal, Visa/MC, etc.
d) Offer commercial customization options online so anyone who uses your software can purchase enhancements.
e) Offer support services so anyone who uses your software can get support.
f) Sell documentation.
g) Sell certification.
h) Sell training.
i) Sell merchandise using the software and your accomplishments as advertisement. A simple contribute/donation option and a url link are much more pleasant than a full screen flashing advertisement from the perspective of the customer.
j) Sell systems designed to run your software.
k) Sell yourselves, offer money in exchange for your time on interviews, presentations, implementation/contracting, analysis/design, review/benchmarking with news and mass media, etc.
l) Ask for donation (politely) from other F/OSS organizations if they are using your software.
m) Be evil and try to make your customers pay by only offering the software for sale on your website, for very high prices, with marketting fluff and very little internal information so your customers can't tell what you do (if anything) to your software behind the scenes, then only give your source code modifications to the people who ask for it and only if it is required because you borrowed your source code from someone else because you were too [slow|stupid|lazy|greedy|cheap] to do it yourself, but unfortunately (for you) they were smart enough to release it with a GPL style license. So now you claim they don't exist and threaten to sue everyone who uses any copies of this software that you didn't authorize, build up your army of lawyers and plan to take over the world.
And that is also what I think about OSS. I have nothing against OSS. However, I think that a business model based on OSS *has* to release poorly documented software or bad UI or anything that will require support. If OSS had a super good UI that allowed any grandma to use it without any trouble, how the heck could any OSS business make money on support?
However, a lot of closed source software business have free e-mail/tel support. It is in *their* interest to make their software easy to use and well documented.
I'm not bashing OSS, I'm saying that IMHO, the OSS business model is flawed if it means that the business revenues come from support. (Of course, there are OSS business models where OSS is fine, like if the revenues come from hardware.)
perception is reality
Mrs. Ruth Wakefield. Why ? Because she only sold 1 freaking receipt for all the R&D she invested in it. Now, Nestle's happily selling chocolate, but Mrs. Ruth Wakefield has income trouble.
perception is reality
What he is describing is called a user interface. He just takes a long time to say it.
Functionality is hard to get right. Thats what development is for.
User Interface is also hard to get right. But its a totally different kind of hard that takes into account all sorts of fluffy things.
"Editorial Style" is just another way of saying U.I. design, because ultimately what companies like Sun are going to get you to pay for is ease of use.
Ease of Use, Usability, Packaging, Whatever you call it its all the same thing.
Why bother with an analogy from a seperate industry when you have a perfectly good term for what you do in your own?
-Ian
sounds like your having a bit of a hippy flashback.
- ... His fortunes changed in 1999. Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading purveyors of Linux-based software packages tailored for large enterprises, had granted him stock options with no strings attached, thank-yous from entrepreneurs who hoped to grow rich off his creation. When Red Hat went public that year, Torvalds was suddenly worth $1 million. On the day VA Linux (now VA Software) went public, Torvalds was worth roughly $20 million, though by the time he could sell his shares, they were valued at only a fraction of that.
... [Wired Magazine, Gary Livlin, 11.11, Leader of the Free World]
In numerous articles it outlines he has made a comfortable amount money (not stinking rich, but not poor either) out of his work. And for the ideas and toil deserves every bit of it. I think most interesting idea was giving Linux away. Linus said it himself who said that probably the best idea was to make Linux freely available.peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Give away code including bugs and all for free but charge for those bug fix/patch releases. ;-)
Did I read that correct? Sun Microsystems discussing how a company can be profitable while giving away source. Am I the only one that sees the irony here?
id Software does this to considerably positive effect. They released the source to everything related to Quake II and earlier they were allowed to.
They won't profit from those products again, but they can entice would-be licensees with demonstrations of past experience, and then wow them with current stuff (Q3A, DOOM3) and charge larger amounts for that.
1. Give away older stuff
2. Sell licenses to current stuff
3. Profit!!!
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
That, of course, is all disingenuous manipulation of the truth. I predict that, if this ongoing bid to mislead consumers of the value of subscribing to software actually succeeds, then the next in line to miseducate consumers will be the actual appliance manufacturers themselves: you'll no longer BUY a washer, microwave, or refrigerator, you'll "subscribe" to them.
Actually, this "subscription" model sounds a lot more like a "rental" model to me, but IANACFO.
I believe what you're talking about is "Open Standard", not "Open Source". To encourage people to develop applications or components to plug in to your services system so that more people will purchase your services system is very, very analagous to what Sun is doing with Java.
the salesman
different generation, different locale. Jobs was around at the birth of the PC revolution. He's had plenty of time to create products (hardware + software), make mistakes and sell to a large domestic then international market. I dont think Jobs has ever given away code. Jobs has a knack (and the appropriate reality distortion field ) to foster an ideas environment, root out the better ones (for good or bad: read Insanly Great and think Andy Herzfeldt (And another thing)), take a punt and back the idea to the hilt.
For that Apple, Next, Pixar have delivered big bucks.
the engineer
Compared to Jobs and Apple, Linus and Linux are babies. Linux is a product of it's time. Just like in Victorian England where amateur gentleman had the time (and money) to ponder, think, question and execute their way into the industrial revolution, Linus tucked away in his bedroom with a donated '386 and copy of GCC gave heart and life to the GNU suite of tools in the form of the Linux kernal.
This is one big block in the Information revolution that is now occuring. And while Linus maybe currently *worth less* than Jobs the potential for Linux to generate new wealth is staggering.
In Killer App, Downes and Mui argue that moore + metcalf = law of disruption + coase . Linux and the birth of the Internet has in a way directly influenced this. Anyone who can exploit these effects and sell products stand to make $$$.
Linux is a product. How Linus utilises his time, programming and creating or selling: Its up to him.
'... Beyond that, make $$$ by selling some commercial software that people are not willing to write for their own enjoyment or use. ...'
think diesel not ford ... produce software that others have yet to think of or cannot do for themselves. Not everyone want's to sit behind a keyboard and have to understand computers. But to think you can make a living the old way, ignoring mr more and metcalf and hope that distruption and coase go away is shere lunacy.
or to put in a different light
I like to think of Linux as revolutionary as the Diesel engine (which by the way was not patented and possibly led to the early death of Rudolf
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Advertise? that helps you competitors as well as you.
You don't work for one of those companies that only hold patents do you, or the republican party?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.