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Profiting from Open Source Software
Secret Santa writes "Alex Salkever has written an inspiring and Linux-friendly piece about Martin Roesch -- how he went from writing open-source software to building a multimillion dollar company. Excerpt: 'Sourcefire is one of a growing number of small software players that have built new businesses around open-source code. Their business models contain various mixes of proprietary and open-source software components and span the software gamut, from other security companies such as Tripwire to database outfits such as MySQL and desktop-computing offerings like Xandros. Most are still small, with revenues well under $50 million.'"
Make a package that everyone loves (starting as open source), then either get bought up by some company for your copious skills at making such a well-loved package, or making a proprietary add-on ... it's something I've failed doing time and time again. I'm glad to see that it does indeed work from time to time, else we might see fewer and fewer contributions to open source than we do.
It usually means you get open source software to do all the difficult stuff, then put closed-source stuff on top of it as a sort of value add, then sell the whole package. Pretty much every small software company operates this way these days, because it's far easier than trying to implement an entirely new system by yourself. I can't help but thinking it sort of violates the spirit of the open source community, while still adhering to the letter of the law as put out by the GPL. I guess this is where ESR's "leveraging open source to make money" philosophy clashes with Stallman's "free software for everybody" philosophy.
Stallman's "free software for everybody" philosophy is utopian. While it'd be great if all software didn't cost a dime, it's neither dramatic nor heroic when you can't support your family by doing the thing you do best, write software.
Truth be told, services and support cannot always pay for the bills, especially when you're a small company with a relatively small number of customers. Sadly, people like Stallman would rather get caught up in the political melodrama of the idea that "commercial software is evil" than deal with reality.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
RTFA again. The Snort guy also says that there's no money in open-source software, which is why he came up with this mixed model.
Oh, and every time Gates is right and you're wrong, you have to give him 500 million dollars. Sorry about that.
I see most of the money being made off of Open Source in exactly the way Stallman envisioned - service. So far as I know Suse and Redhat are publicly available, what you pay for is the service you get when you buy it from them.
"brxref
Software industry is moving to subscription model anyway - once it completes the migration, open source and closed source will cost the same.
Some here mention RH "making money off OSS" - they are because others are debugging and developing for them (they do have their own contributors, true) but for less popular OSS apps if you have to develop and debug by yourself and you collect maintenance and support money only, how do you do research and development within the same budget? You can't innovate significantly on a shitty budget - you can only GPL-code what has been done by someone else.
Those who charge for maintenance and support alone can't by definition be much more cost-efficient from closed source competitors who do the same (perhaps the OSS guys wouldn't spend on ads and lawyers, but apart from that, I just don't see why would OSS be more cost effective - at least not to the 99% of corporate customers that aren't interested in the code itself).
And RH-like companies' ability to make money off OSS is proportional to the lock-in effect they can create with their distribution or application. If transparency and portability between different versions of Linux becomes 100%, then price becomes the only remaining differentiation which pushes the distros in deadly price competition.
Just imagine how easy it would be to ask RH for a discount if you could migrate your Oracle on RH to Oracle on Debian in an hour, or move from one OSS firewall to another by simply loading the exported settings into another tool...
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>Anyways, there you have it folks. Free engineering from a large community. Thats what the buisnesspeople want out of open source. And the profit comes from making the interface.
Great developers seldom make great user interface designers. The skillsets are wildly different.
Great developers solve problems and scratch itches. They're not so great on making it usable, because they don't need usability to scratch that itch.
How many times have people whined about, say, how hard it is to set up video capture on Linux, only to be shot down with an arrogant or condescending "Hey, luser, I didn't write this for you, if you don't like it, code your own!"
"Well, fine, but I can't!", screams the UI dude. Because great UI designers aren't only "not great developers", many "aren't developers at all!". Some UI folks work on a project from genesis to release without ever seeing a line of code; they just talk to humans, mock up UI designs on storyboards in Photoshop (sorry GIMP fans :), take prototypes to humans, watch the humans use the prototypes, talk to the humans some more, and then come back with long lists of changes for the developers to make.
Does that sound like "fun" for anybody here? Let's face it - UI design, prototyping, and testing is a time-consuming job, and there are very few "fun" things about it (when compared to, say, coding on a problem you think is really interesting).
Corollary 1: Due to the nature of the work, most UI designers tend to want to get paid for it. ...and therefore, spend most of their time in commercial shops, where they don't have much contact with OSS developers, even if OSS developers wanted their contributions in the first place (which, as a browse of any Linux-PVR thread will reveal, they don't :)
Corollary 2:
> But... is it possible for Interface design profit to sustain code design in the long run? Once open source interfaces catch up, will this niche remain?
Bottom line: You cannot assume that open source interfaces will ever "catch up" with their commercial equivalents, because the gap between UI designer and "open source coder" is cultural, not merely technical.
OSS is a magnet for developers. The community holds no similar attraction for UI designers.
and it's a common misnomer in the OS world that people think that GPL provides them some protection from someone else coming along and selling it. Anyone can sell it for any price, as long as they provide the source. People need to learn how to read.
click me
I target only Linux, and refuse all other jobs. This will be your failure. I'm happy your business is growing and may soon support you without the need for a seperate full time job. However, please remember the number one rule of consulting... Always use the right tool for the job. Do NOT try to shoe horn the job into your chosen tool of choice. Doing so will eventually lead to failure.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
I target only Linux, and refuse all other jobs. This will be your failure. I'm happy your business is growing and may soon support you without the need for a seperate full time job. However, please remember the number one rule of consulting... Always use the right tool for the job. Do NOT try to shoe horn the job into your chosen tool of choice. Doing so will eventually lead to failure.
Ehhh, there's also the matter of different levels of resource allocation. If doing a given thing for a single platform takes x effort, then for a one-programmer shop, doing it for n platforms takes damn near nx effort. If GP poster is happy working only on Linux, and the services he provides have a wide enough market, there's probably enough room for expansion without him having to target other platforms. Now, if he were running a larger consulting firm, I'd agree with you that he's foolishly limiting himself, but it doesn't sound like that's the situation here.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Yeah, much like getting health care from a doctor that isn't paid is good...
If you can't make a living as a programmer, you'll have several types of programmers:
1. Those that do it because they love it and can afford to not get paid. (the best case)
2. Those who do it when they can but still love it. They just have to fit it in with another job to make a living. (You wanted that patch fast?)
3. Those who wouldn't make money at it anyway.
The vast majority with be #2s. Basically, you'll have someone who has divided attentions and works when he can based on how tired he is from his paying job. Eventually, if coding consumes too much time, the project will be dropped or hopefully passed on to someone else who is most likely a #2.
Probably, the folks who have the most spare time to code are young folks who aren't married, have kids, etc. This isn't that bad, I guess, except for lack of experience. By the time you get married, buy a house, have kids, etc., you don't have the time to support a project as a full-time second job.
This will be your failure. ... Always use the right tool for the job.
So he only accepts jobs where Linux is the right tool. Problem solved.
``Software industry is moving to subscription model anyway - once it completes the migration, open source and closed source will cost the same.''
Nope, OSS will be cheaper. There are various reasons for this.
First off, retail price being the same, OSS is cheaper. If you want new features, bugfixes, or other changes, you can do it yourself or go with the lowest bidder. With proprietary software, you would have to pay whatever the copyright holder charges you.
Secondly, OSS is prone to fewer risks than proprietary software. The "many eyes" argument is debatable, but there are other issues. OSS doesn't become unsupported when the company behind it folds, or EOLs the product.
Thirdly, OSS is cheaper to produce and maintain. You can reuse code developed by others (without paying royalties) and get free extensions and bugfixes from interested parties. This would all have to be paid from your own pockets if you were developing proprietary software.
OSS is thus cheaper to produce and more valuable to the customer. Whether or not you will actually be able to turn these advantages depends on the case. Generally, this will be more difficult for commodity software than for custom software.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The more I think about it, OSS programmers aren't pioneering a radically different way of doing business. When I get the oil changed in my car, I know what's being done, it's just that I don't want to mess with my car and possibly screw something up, so I take it to a professional I can trust. With open source software, you can check out what the program does, and then hire the professional to make it work in your system/situation.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?