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.'"

Comments

Re:Money in support??

[Russ Nelson]

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