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Making Money Using Open Source Software?
GamblerZG asks: "As many of us probably know, convincing people to run Free Software can sometimes be a tedious task. However, there are a lot of factors that help us in that regard, and, perhaps, the biggest of them is a simple truth: Free Software is free. It's hard to argue with such statement. I know it, because I faced it today, trying to convince my fellow co-worker that it is possible to profit by writing GNU-licensed code. 'How company can make money, if its products are available for free?' That was a valid question indeed, and I could not find any simple answers to respond with. That makes me wonder, whether there are articles on the Internet, which explain and analyze how Open Source business models work? Do you know any ways to prove that such models can be profitable?" It can be done, you can check out a recent interview with an Open Source Entrepreneur on NewsForge for some hints. What other ideas and business plans do you think would be a good match for a business with an Open Source core?
See www.redhat.com, see www.sendmail.com, and so on and so forth. These people sell opensource product support, and make money doing it. This doesn't require paying some "analyst" $50k+ to write you a white paper on how to make money.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Check out this other article about making money and open source that was on indicthreads.
Cathedral and the Bazzar.
Apple has been using Open Source and making money from it for a few years now. Their model is to have open source and freely available core components (Darwin, Webkit, etc) then build value on top of it and charge for that.
I think we'll start to see this model adopted more and more.
Yeah, but can anybody spot the other problem?
"How can a company make money if its products were available for free?"
The if...were is a hypothetical subjunctive; the writer is making a statement contrary to fact. The company's products are not available for free; the case is being postulated where they are.
Lots more details in Wikipedia, of course.
(No, I'm not a card-carrying pedant. It's made out of plastic.)
Using Google search terms "make money using open source", I came up with the following:
-101 Ways to Make Money off Open Source
-How to make money with Open Source Software
-Making an open source living
-eWeek:How to Make Money Off Open Source
I am not intending to be snitty in suggesting that you search Google; there were tons of other seemingly-good resources contained within it, and it might just be a case of different search terms. You might be able to team the information gained there with the advice of people here.
Also, if you can gain access to the class papers from the Boston Embedded Systems conference, particularly those from Bill Gatliff in 2003, there were tons of developers there who lectured on this very thing, citing examples and explaining the ins and outs of open-source licensing. I thought Bill Gatliff did an excellent job, and you may be able to contact him through his website for some resources.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
Business is competitive. You make it sound like it's a bad thing that you cannot maintain a monopoly on support of your product. Compete to be the best support available for your product (or other's products). In the end, it only improves things for everyone.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
There are other businesses where some parts of the theory behind OSS make them money.
I pay plenty of bar tenders to make me "Open-source" drinks that I know damn well how to make on my own because I'm just no good at it or I don't want to take the time to go to the store or I'm too tired to make it etc. etc..
People pay for hamburgers at restaurants all the time, even though even little kids know what goes in them, because they don't want to go to the store and buy all the stuff and they don't have the tools to prepare it or the skill to do it well. They just want to eat. It's a matter of convenience and skill and action.
You just have to choose the right market. When a bar tender is behind the bar she doesn't pay another bar tender to make her a drink that they both know how to make, but after her shift is over and she's dead tired, relaxing on the other side of the bar she will. Likewise, you probably won't be able to sell your OSS products to people who make their own OSS products. You sell them to people who need solutions to problems that you can provide using tried and true OSS code. To sound really cliche, if you're selling OSS stuff you're a "solutions provider" and your solution just happens to involve free software, but businesses will still pay you to solve their problems because you are doing work, your tools are just free.
The question about making money is referring to the present - the same point at which the products are hypothetically available for free. English isn't a language where every 'if' clause takes a subjunctive. This sentence isn't expressing doubt or disbelief; it's a condition posed as a question.
Ok..Not exactly me..but my company. We have used products from AdaCore Technologies. http://www.gnat.com/.A couple of years back, the cost for several supported seats for both a self and a cross compiler (for embedded work) with a few small add ons was something like $25k. We'd gladly pay it again. The product was great. The support was great and we had access to the source code which is a real help in an embedded environment .
--- Liberty in our Lifetime