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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.'"
You can add spyware to your app and sell it to download.com in order to make money .... cough ...cough
http://saveie6.com/
This article defines "2. ????". Dare I read it?
I run a small, and growing, side business in addition to my full time job. I target only Linux, and refuse all other jobs.
My first product worked so much better than the alternatives, and cost so much less to implement, that I have no problem making good money this way.
I am currently employed by a Sourcefire reseller and must say that I really enjoy working with the company. The philosophies of most of those employed by SF fall squarely in line with my philosophies, so that helps. They don't seem... evil. Plus - they have a cool office, that helps, right?
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
This must be wrong. Bill Gates told me there isn't any money in open source software. The guy probably stole the money from SCO.
But seriously, there's not much meat to the article. Basically, what it says is:
- This is the guy behind Snort and Sourceforge
- He started a company and now he's making money
- His clients appreciate the open-source nature of the product
- He has to please the open source community, who in turn support help him support and improve the software
- Profit!
As if none of us would have suspected that there is money in open source software. I don't see how the article is that relevant, seeing as most of us here have heard of Red Hat.*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
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.
This is timely; I was just thinking about a similar thing this morning. Back in the 1980's and 90's, one could start up a software company which filled a niche, and take it to profitablility and even an IPO, without the usual VC BS. Borland comes to mind, but there are many other examples. All of this was before Software Patents really came along.
I haven't seen anyone doing this lately; at least, not outside of Open Sourced efforts. It seems like if you go the closed source, proprietary route these days, you'd better have a good deal of cash to fight the Patent Wars against the freeloading lawyers who come along. I can think of several examples. Yet no one seems to target the Open Source Companies and try to shut them down. So it seems like this is the only way the little guy can hope to win, without having to bend over for the VCs.
So, my question to the community is this: Are they any modern examples out there where an individual can successfully go it alone these days (all the way to IPO)? And if not (or if these are the exceptions), to what degree is this due to Software Patents?
My suspicion is that there aren't any, or at least many, modern examples these days of people being successful without the money to create one's own patent portfolio and defend themselves, legally. And if this is indeed the case, it's a superb example of how software patents have hurt the industry, rather than helped it.
I don't want to fiddle with config files buried /deep/in/your/ass. /etc and ~/.etc are good enough for me, thank you.
From the article: "Anyone could look at the software's underlying code, but reselling Snort was proscribed under the rules of its open-source license." This is, of course, not true. You can sell snort, as long as you provide the source code as well. Perhaps the author should take a look at the GPL, it's a really quick read. /me sighs
Some people have a way with words, and some people... erm... thingy
1) The article could just as easily be titled "Failing to Profit from Open Source Software".
2) What it seems to suggest is that hybrid models combining some open-source goods and a general use of the "open-source culture" with some proprietary products is the way to go, especially for a product where you can't expect to create a lucrative consulting business.
3) I suspect 2) works a lot better when you market to businesses than if you tried to sell to individual users who are allergic to paying for software and have a sense of "You owe it to The Community!" entitlement that corporate users lack.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
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?
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
You must be new to our planet, everything causes suicide in japan.
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...
That depends on if you're a realist, or a moony pie-in-the-sky idealist. The fact is that having the open stuff wrapped in a proprietary interface is good for everyone. The company is motivated to fix bugs, the software gains more acceptance, and the community is motivated to make a new interface. Everyone wins.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>
>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 must say this stuff is just rediculous. We have been profiting on open source software for almost 5 years. Taking Linux PC's, configuring them for average people (internet, java, music, etc.) and selling it. People completely underestimate the frustration with Windows. I think to succeed in in the business of open source it depends more on a business sense and less on a demand by the market. Seems the people I know who use Linux are so afraid to let a Windows user get lost that they don't push it. Quite the contrary! Linux is coming just like Firefox has. Sell your product and stop worrying about the monopoly you're up against!
Jesse Jarzynka
Cyber Source
http://www.jessejoe.com/
It's not a dream anymore for some, it's a reality. Just like Matt Mullenweg was recently hired by C|Net because of his work on WordPress.
Having done some work with SourceFire's products (I worked on a contract that accounted for a majority of their total deployed IDS boxes in existence at one point), I have mixed feelings about the company. Yeah, meeting Marty is cool, and the pink pig T-shirts are cute, and it's worth some amount of geek points to say that I've used their stuff. But the products they sell and the company itself suffer from the exact same problems that plague all other IT companies.
Even though the under-the-hood technology is k3wl and using Snort sigs is l33t, the admin and management tools are frankly not up to par compared to other offerings out there. I mean, it's not as bad as ManHunt, but it still takes waaay too many mouse clicks and unnecessary repetition by a human to get simple admin tasks done. I've seen gigs of sensor data lost to DB corruption (thankfully nothing critical) and have gone through the whole oh-crap we'll-get-that-critical-bug-fixed-next-release trip with them more than once. Support is a mixed bag, sometimes excellent, sometimes okay, sometimes really slow and annoying.
Bottom line is, companies are companies, there's nothing magical about open-source ones that make their products inherently better or more desirable for any other reason than to boost one's ego and to say that You Were There Back When. If I were recommending an IDS product line to a customer (which I probably wouldn't do anyway), I would encourage them to do some careful research before settling on SF.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
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.
Go watch it and if you're curious, read on. If not...that's good too as I'm only going to ramble a bit;
What I take from it is that the developer should reject the impulse to build everything from scratch and build just the core tool kit for others to use. After all, you can't know what other people are thinking or what they want...even if they tell you.
Along those lines, I look for projects like Plone that build on the work that preceeded it (Python to Zope to Plone) and make it easy to design extentions (Plone Products) that interoperate with the lower levels. I avoid monolythic projects that don't seem to be flexable enough to incorporate other toolkits. This is not pre-made integration, though. Quite the opposite.
Having the lower levels available and modifiable (Python source of Zope and Plone) means that you're not locked into one and only one way of doing things if you need to make changes. The vendor or core developer(s) don't dictate what you do or how you do it. Yet, along the chain each part works well with the levels above and below it.
Additional link; Erik Von Hippel.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
``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?
>> Who, in this day and age, wants to edit just text
um, ever hear of source code?
If someone writes a compiler that changes behaviour based on colours or fonts, I will personally bury my foot deep/in/their/ass.