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BBC Examines Open Source Business Model
twitter writes "The BBC's David Reid attended Euro OSCon in Amsterdam and reports what he learned about the Open Source Model. He sums up the rise of non free software in the 1980s and how people and companies like IBM can make money with free software. From the article: 'The open source movement does not object to making money. The source code may be free, but there is gold in software support, training and publishing.'"
The parent of this isn't a troll. If it's a troll, then Keith Bostic has also been trolling over the years, and I doubt that. Yes, it does appear that there is a tension between having to do a good enough job that people like your software, but a lousy enough job that people need to buy your services. But, really, I haven't gotten all THAT much business through bugfixing. Most of my business has come from people with different requirements, e.g. it does X; that's great, but we need it to do Y on the Z platform.
For example, I had a packet driver customer who wanted to put packet drivers into an air traffic control system, but he needed to detect hardware transmission errors so that he could log hardware failure. I had another customer who was building special Ethernet hardware for operating rooms, and the existing packet driver needed changes relative to network connection detection.
The worst business I've had has been bug fixes, because, damnit, if I could have fixed the bug in the first place, I would have!
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
There are companies that sell bottled water... so there's got to be some way to make money stuff that is given away for free.
;)
They give away water where you're from? Where I live it's part of my monthly utility bill
But seriously, the US economy has been converting over to a service economy over teh past century. It has been quite some time since GDP was more products than services. Products can be made anywhere, and with software the transportation cost is nearly $0. If you rely on software products then you had better be sure that you're the best or else because lower-cost software can be made in India and China.
Services can go either way. The call center may be in Bangalore, but if you need someone to come to your business in Topeka either for training or an on-site service call, there's definitely not going to be someone coming from New Delhi to do the job. Services are a great hedge against the future, which is probably why IBM is shifting focus away from solely producing their international business machines to providing consulting service. Plus, it's perfectly in line with where the US economy has been headed for decades.
I don't think there's any irony here, because Gates was being sarcastic. The letter itself was bitter complaint about the majority of Altair users not paying for copies of BASIC and hence "stealing" the development effort he had put into writing it.
At the time, this was rather novel concept. The mainframe and minicomputer vendors of the era basically sold hardware, the cost of which far dwarfed that of hiring programmers to write the operating system and application software they ran. Thus, turnkey solutions were not common; institutions like universities, banks and government agencies simply hired large computer departments to support their software.
When cheap, mass-produced microprocessor-based computers appeared, a sort of upside-down market appeared. The unit cost of each computer was low enough for hobbyists to buy a computer each; each hobbyist could be separately sold software as one would boxed goods to recoup any up-front development costs.
As with selling other kinds of consumer goods, selling software like this can be very marketing intensive: so much so that today, in this age of web-based services, the shrink-wrapped cardboard box frames the wider public's perception of what software is. It's interesting to see that many newly-arrived computer graduates, having used consumer hardware all their lives, are sometimes shocked (or even offended) to see tangles of homebrew, site-specific stuff running behind the scenes in the enterprise. Surprisingly, many managers also hold similar views and believe complicated systems can always be snapped together easily (a la Lego) from off-the-shelf boxed products.
That letter was Gates on the cusp of realizing that he had a viable future business model. It looks like he really went on to change the world—whether for better or for worse, I don't really know.