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.'"

Comments

Isn't that the dream?

[YetAnotherName]

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.

R & D vs. Maintenance and Support

[Donny Smith]

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...

No UI folks in OSS? It's a cultural thing.

[Tackhead]

> How can a company that makes a front-end for Snort be worth $100 million!
>
>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.
Corollary 2: ...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 :)

> 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.

Re:Open Source Business

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.