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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?
I am a big fan of making the source free but charging for support. This gives the user/customer so much more power. They can work on your application all they want, if they get stuck or need help, they call and pay you. You can offer initial setup and configuration. Many large companies charge quite a bit for support contracts. You can as well, with the advantage of having a lower TCO for your customers.
http://www.sakaiproject.org/support.html
In brief, the Sakai project was started by a few large institutions who were tired of buying into the licensing fees of other learning management system products like WebCT and Blackboard. They decided to create their own and make it open source - both free as in beer and speech. However, the support for Sakai comes at a price, albeit a much lower price than the aforementioned commercial products were offering.
In the end, you recieve a completely open learning managment system created and maintained by developers at these institutions and supported by commercial interests.
I attended a chat last night with someone who works for a very large medical device company. They talked about how important intellectual property was to them and that it is their life blood. So they patent as much as possible and lock up everything as tight they can to get a competetive advantage on the competition.
/. crowd and the fsf folks have to say as this is a lot of what I hear coming out of this company and even other tech companies. So its a huge obsticle to overcome for the open source/fs movement.
However, he also stressed "living the mission" where there mission is to essentially alievate pain, help people live longer better lives." And in his next breath he said that his company would sue anyone who copies their ideas to do remote patient check ups on pacemakers etc.
So I asked, doesn't this contradict the mission, how can you on one hand be for helping people but writing proprietary software that maximizes your revenue? Why don't you open source it all, wouldn't that be a better fulfillment of the mission? He responded by saying that it is essential that the company do this to ensure that it can be financially healthy to continue to provide these services and develop new ones.
It seemed pretty logical to me, but I want to hear what the
A counter-example (and an interesting business approach) is trolltech:
They created the QT library, and they are giving it away under GPL. They make a profit from companies that need the library for non-GPL products.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
Not all software is written for sale as software; there seems to be somewhat of a perception that this is the only kind of software out there.
For example, where I work at a research hospital, the software I work on is used for analysis of MRI images. It's not GPLed, but it's open source, free, and pretty much anyone can get access. Our money comes from grants.
In my previous job, I worked at a major defense contractor. Software wasn't written for "sale" persay, there either. Instead, we were given a contract by a government agency to develop a piece of software for them. Of course, we couldn't open-source that software because it was sensitive, but I'm sure there are plenty of other cases of "software by contract" out there where the submitter or recipient of the contract has no financial interest in software sales - just in getting the contract filled.
Clean coal harnesses the awesome power of the word 'clean'.
Indeed, TrollTech is IMO the very best example of a successful OSS company I can think of. They do purely development and support, and they make money off of both.
However, I would argue that the reason they make that money is because they have smartly found a niche that encourages it - writing libraries that everybody wants to use. And, of course, they do what I would suggest to would-be OSS developement companies -- dual licensing.
IMO, dual licensing is key to OSS. For non-commercial purposes, one is basically free to do what they want (or it's licensed under GPL, whatever). But for commercial purposes, the license becomes more restrictive and demanding of money.
TrollTech really is probably the model the OSS community should look towards...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
We've had this problem, so I'm not speaking theoretically. Most of our users bought support with the purchase of our commercial product, but after one year many of them didn't want to renew because they hadn't had any problems and didn't know what they were paying for.
A business plan that is based on support is at direct cross purposes with creating high-quality, easy-to-use software.
"GMZ: Was this always meant to be free software ? Did you ever try to "get rich" with it? Do you regret that you didn't?
LL: At the time, it never really occurred to me that people would pay money for software. I certainly didn't think that people would pay money for a book about software. Fortunately, Peter Gordon at Addison-Wesley convinced me to turn the LaTeX manual into a book. In retrospect, I think I made more money by giving the software away and selling the book than I would have by trying to sell the software. I don't think TeX and LaTeX would have become popular had they not been free. Indeed, I think most users would have been happier with Scribe. Had Scribe been free and had it continued to be supported, I suspect it would have won out over TeX. On the other hand, I think it would have been supplanted more quickly by Word than TeX has been." (From TUGboat 22 (2001)
Just a very succesful case of money made out of free/open source software that is often overlooked (and maybe one of the oldest cases as well!)
Paths to make money of OSS
1) Support. Provide support for the software. Fixing or adapting it to the customers requirements for money.
2) Installation. Really a subset of support. Will install and train in the usage of OSS for money.
3) Add/Create OSS for money. They customer wants something. You will code it.