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Making a Living Building Open Source Software?
asimbaig asks: "When I started my IT Staffing and Placement firm last year, I couldn't find a decent Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or an Open Source alternative. I then found SugarCRM, and was blown away by its power and ease of use. Partly frustrated with the existing vendors and partly inspired by SugarCRM, I decided to write that ATS using LAMP. 6 months and 45k lines of code later, I have just released the preview of industry's first Open Source ATS/HR Management system, called CATS. Now, it will be an interesting experiment to see if I can actually make a living out of it and move away from my IT staffing business. SugarCRM seems to be doing well, so why not?. Is anyone out there making a living from writing Open Source code?"
Congratulations on getting your press release on Slashdot. Seriously, did you blow your whole marketing budget, or did they give you a discount for the dupes that will show up later in the week?
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I prototype stuff on legal padds during slow times at work and write code at home. Does that count?
You are not the customer.
You're trying to do two very difficult things at the same time
a) start a successful business b) make money off open source
I know a few people that work for WindRiver, Apple, Adaptec, etc that make money off open source; I also know a few people that have actually started their own businesses and are making money.
Can't say I know anybody in both groups....
Good luck, hope you have good credit.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
As an example I can see a profitable service doing phone installation and configuration, maintenece with Asterisk, you supply the knowledge for setup and expansion and be there for the customer when problems occur. Given such a complex system (even for proprietary like Cisco) businesses are going to be paying for support subscriptions, except the software costs/licensing (TCO) are less.
Now if you did write the software and are the project lead then you have even a better in as your customers would have knowledge that thier problems will be resolved in a reasonable timespace. Depending on the application that could be a bump in fees (even if the code is OSS). But that could bite you if some PHB customer twists your arm to install some laming feature or compromise into your product.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
1. Create an open-source HR people
2. Spam Slashdot
3. ???
4. Profit
Your challenge will be attracting HR people who purchase stuff like this.
Problems:
- Your average personnel administrator doesn't know jack about open source
- IT staff who care about something being open-source drive those sorts of purchases at many companies.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Why do you need to create another license?
Just pick one: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.php
you must remember that since you're trying to profit from an open source project, the software itself is essentially public domain and you won't be able to sell licenses for it. If you try to jump through licensing hoops to try and prevent that, you won't get as much support from the OSS community in support and integration for your product. Remember you can't make money selling electrons.
So where's the money come from? That's what everyone's trying to figure out. The subscription model is one, selling support licenses is another. I'm trying to find a way to sell complete systems, so the value isn't so much in the software but in the labor put into building a complete open source system. There are as many ways to try and hack this as there are open source programmers.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
I've written several programs for OS/2 - eCS and posted on hobbes.nmsu.edu hoping to one day make money. Never made a dime. Good luck to you.
/. though.
Congrats on getting a press release on
Nathan
I wish someone would tell me how well it pays..
You just got troll'd!
create yet *another* OSS license???? Surely one of the existing
ones would have been sufficient... it's not like there aren't 900000 gazillion
to pick from.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Are you telling me you just spent a lot of time building a piece of software, which you've already licensed, and you've decided now is the time to come up with a business plan? That is pretty backwards, in my opinion.
There are a number of business plans for selling software and even a number of them for making money from Open Source Software:
Plan number one, sell licenses to closed source software. I think you've already missed this one and it has the disadvantage that it can't compete against an open source product in the long run.
Plan number two, get a company or conglomerate of companies to agree to pay you to develop and support a cheaper, better, more customizable alternative to their existing software. I think you missed this one two, if you already made the code public.
Plan number three, release code for free and try to get companies to adopt it and pay you for support and customization. This is probably your best bet at this point. You need to find out what current companies charge for support and what they charge for their software and meet or beat their prices; or, you need to provide significantly more functionality. You need to get some good sales guys and give them the advantages of your product over other products. Main advantages you hold include the fact that it is open and thus they can migrate to other systems and that you or they can customize it to meet their needs. Find out what their current software doesn't do that they would like and make yours do it, just for them. Emphasize the personal service as part of a support contract that is semi-annually renewed or whatever. This is your revenue. Drawbacks to this include that the better your software gets, the less likely they are to need support and they can always go with their own IT dept. or with a competitor for support. You have the edge in that you know it better than anyone and are someone external to blame/call.
Plan number four, release the product for free and promote it. Beg for donations from big companies that adopt it and other benefactors. If it becomes popular your reputation will be worth a lot to you for speaking engagements and other contract work.
Best of luck.
"Outlook not so good" It's funny cause it's true; I contribute to projects and code because others do, and the whole community aspect spurs us on. I hate it when I see the "Please donate, this software cost over 2000$ in development for me!", come on...if you want money for your project, try to sell it, if you want people to contribute to your project make it really, really good.
fak3r.com
Perhaps a dual licensing model would allow you to make some money. Have source code open and available for free. Educational institutions, non-profit orgs and evaluators can use this... commercial user must buy a license. Non-commercial licensers must provide you with any modifications / improvements they make. Commercial users could get a more stable and better supported version. Also you could charge for services, training, ...
Not sure how profitable this would be, but it might be better than a pure open source model. Anyone heard of people being successful under this model?
That's a great break down. And pretty true. Developing OS software is a money hole. Supporting OS software is a cash cow. The trick is to make enough money supporting the software to pay for continued development and marketing the product.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Err, where exactly is the source for this "open source" project? How about some screenshots, it's not as if the website is mega-stylish. A frontpage of /. does appear to be a bit premature for this project.
Should you really have live data, names, phone numbers, and contact info available in the demo?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
1) Sort orders only sort current page instead of entire data list
2) Search functionality only allows searching on name
3) Key skills is a flat text field, a table with skills and years exp would be nice
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Is it for great justice or will it involve bases?
Are you sure?
That's right. They expect that you give back as many electrons as they give you.
If you found some way of keeping the electrons, your house would begin emitting sparks as the static electricity increased. Anyone who tried to ring your doorbell would be electrocuted. Not a way have friends.
The power company sells you electron pressure, not electrons.
The guy's code is not even released, there is only the promise of a release.
Seems pretty far from open source at this point. I agree with the previous poster, it seems like the guy wanted to get his press release on Slashdot.
You have the basic elements for a business already in place. The current problem is making all the pieces fit together. Balancing the components will be an ongoing task.
You seem to have:
Assuming that all these factors are true, it would seem to follow that using a service model may be the best use of your time. The staffing part of your business is the best place to finesse your design, introduce this service to your clients (perhaps as a web enabled application/service) and to discern where the best revenue stream lies.
The only other bit of advice is to see where your energy levels peak. If you like the mix of all these activities then you're in the right place. If however parts of the efforts are draining and irksome then that should be cause for reflection.
Any business will take more then you expect, but if you're enjoying it, it's a blessing.
If not, it would just get more and more draining every day.
This is progress?
Adding to my previous comment: I meant that there is no g in join.
About making money: If you can convince businessmen that you are 100% trustworthy, you can make money by providing your software as a service and charging a small amount each month. Business people do not like running their own servers.
Brilliant.
Philip Greenspun did this with ArsDigita in the 1990's. This proves it can be done.
The option to turn off quotes is in the works. Really put it in for personal inspiration than anything else, believe me...there are no other motives..:-) in fact got the idea from slashdot! I am using Joomla, an open source CMS. I can't seem to figure out how to make it format the address properly. I dont like it either..:-) Wanna help? Btw thanks for pointing the typos. fixed!
Take a look at Sendmail.org and Sendmail.com - one corporate and one OSS.
private String k4_pacific = "Brillant";
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
I've been kicking this around: Code validation. The idea is simple: you pay someone to validate code you are using. Not only is is bug free (resistent?), but SECURE. No spyware, etc. Just a thought.
I think this is begging to be integrated with egroupware... http://www.egroupware.org/
...FROM open source, you make money from USING open source in some regular "other" business.
All these folks trying to be in the hammer selling business is nuts. Pure cuckoo. And that is why this question always comes up, because it's a puzzler, from some programmers not being able to see the forest from the trees. Yes, a few can make money direct selling, but why do you even want to do that? You and every man jack out there?? Just ain't gonna happen, the world don't need nor want two million hammer sellers. That market is saturated. So switch gears and switch your mindset around and you can see the obvious answer. You need to be in the construction business to make money from hammers. Get it? See the difference? What do companies DO with software, just generally speaking? What do you think those companies do that you want to sell your software hammer to? They do REAL STUFF, a HUGE variety of things. Do one of those things, and just use open source as part of the tool box to run a regular other normal business. Don't try to compete in the very limited hammer selling business, you are artificially restricting yourself in advance to a tiny niche of the entire worlds economy, and one that will be dominated soon by two buck a day typists.
I make 100% of my income off two open source projects: Tapestry and HiveMind. Apache owns the copyright, but the license is free (ASL 2.0). I make my living doing training and project work. This has paid my bills for over two years now.
... and to market! There's no way to tell if you can pull this off without trying.
... but there are also occasions where I feel trapped by my choice. I'll need to come up with something else, someday, but in the meantime I'm loving life. You mileage may vary.
It's not for the faint hearted; my job window is always just a couple of months out but doesn't seem to be drying up either. And you need to be a triple threat: able to code, and to teach and mentor
Even so, my wife has to work (mostly to get health insurance for us).
I love the freedom, especially from PHBs
Howard M. Lewis Ship -- Independent J2EE / Open-Source Java Consultant -- Creator, Apache Tapestry and HiveMind
Ghostscript is actually available under two licenses:
* The current release is available under the AFPL which allows pretty much any personal use but limits commercial use (particularly as part of a product) to licensees who've dealt with Artifex. I looked into this at a past job; the cost wasn't worth it for what we were doing but could be worthwhile for larger-distribution products.
* The previous major release is available under the GPL, with its attendant permissions and restrictions.
So, you might be able to sell the current/maintained version while open-sourcing older versions.
In addition, you might be able to use the razor-blade model - give away the software, but charge for updates to data that's useful to the end-users such as tax information, etc.
fencepost
just a little off
"The power company sells you electron pressure, not electrons."
Not quite.(hint: reduce either term to zero and solve).
For businesses that make a living from selling support (SugarCRM, RedHat etc.), the path is a different one.
First, you create the project. You keep updating it and improving it, until it forms a community. You keep mentioning that you also offer commercial support for the project, but until it has a community of early adopters, no one will pay you to support it.
If you manage to cross that sea, however, there is good money in FOSS. RedHat make all their money by selling support for the product after they managed to turn it into a standard. MySQL argueably do the same (they also try to sell licenses, which is something I'm not sure I agree with). SugarCRM are doing the same, though they did annoy the "community" enough to create a split. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that.
The thing to understand here is that you have a very long road ahead of you yet, before you can actually quit your day job for this.
Personally, I moved into the "sell services, base them on FOSS" business. Some of the FOSS involved was written by us, but we never sell the actual software, always the service behind it.
Shachar
As you wrote the software, you are THE person to turn for potential customers that like the software, but miss feature X.
Hopefully paying you to implement feature X will be cheaper for them compared to buying a commercial solution that already has X.
It might even be possible to provide some infrastructure so various companies together can raise funding for a feature X they mutually want.
I do.
I write OS code for money. People hire me to develop software for a variety of purposes all related to the automotive industry, and it pays quite well. You'd think the customer would later just take my code and make changes themselves, but they usually just call upon me to do it for extra cash, because they realize that despite the fact that my code is written well and readable, it would take longer and thus cost more to get someone to find their way around it, especially because most of my code is written for linux, and most of the employees of my customer are windows developers.
It works quite well for me, but I reckon this particular job is probably a niche thing. I'm not really sure how well this whole develop-something-then-sell-it thing works for a small business.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
have you looked at the Sugar CRM code? It's dreadful.
I agree though it has a lot of user functionality.
There's a lesson here somewhere. It's important in the early stages of a product to pay attention to user needs, otherwise you don't get the momentum you need. From an geek early adopter pov, having access to source code, even bad source code, covers a multitude of sins. It'd be very expensive to bootstrap a proprietary product that was this ambitious.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Even so, my wife has to work (mostly to get health insurance for us).
When it becomes necessary, check out catastrophic (high deductible) health insurance. The cost is a fraction of full coverage, there's very little paperwork, and the cost difference between catastrophic and full coverage is sometimes more than the deductible! If you do have a lot of routine expenses you can tax shelter those costs with a HSA (Health Savings Account). A competent insurance agent should be able to help you out.
... not bad for part time and GPLed work :
s orinfo
http://www.librelogiciel.com/software/PyKota/spon
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
A great deal of what corporations will pay for is the assurance that something will positively get done.
...and maybe more.
You might be willing to make free updates available for your software, but you're not required to do so. You could quit any day. You could take down the project web site any day. You could ignore a security bug for a long time because it only affects a small segment of your users so you figure it can wait. You can document lightly or not at all.
These are all your prerogatives in a hobby project.
Enter the open source software *support* contract, being made popular everywhere by companies popping up to maintain open source applications, often by the original programmers.
The customer purchases a promise from you to apply a certain amount of attention to the project and provide a path of convenience for them using it.
Examples:
- Assurance that they can visit your web site for news, downloads, documentation, contact information at any time.
- Assurance that you will fix all genuine bugs in a reasonable amount of time.
- Assurance that you will provide help in installation, which most people (rightly) see as the hardest part of acquiring the software.
- Perhaps, ways to obtain the software in more convenient, more timely, more automated, or better packaged methods than visiting your web site and downloading a tarball.
- Perhaps, printed manuals which are more likely to get read because they land on an employee's desk.
- Perhaps, telephone support.
You will find that this will please management and many will pay.
Then when someone asks management why they're using XYZ open source program for an important corporate activity (in your example HR) they can say, "Ah yes - it's free but we have the author under contract to supply support and upgrades directly to us."
The phrase "under contract" is a magic phrase in corporations, and it settles the minds of managers because they understand what has happened - they have parted with some money in exchange for a mitigation of risk, which is precisely what they seek to do in every single part of their business except their core competency where they accept the entire risk to generate profits. An auto parts company wants the risks associated with producing auto parts, but no other risk - certainly not a risk that, for example, their HR software program will fail and they can't get support to fix it immediately.
In business school I had the epiphany that just because you can get something for free doesn't mean people wouldn't pay for it; nor do you need to only ever charge for "tangible" things (using the term loosely). The key is that people will pay for things that are even free *today* for the assurance that they can still *rely on them being there later*; and people will also pay for intangible actions, because *having people do things for you* is what makes companies run.
This does of course mitigate one reason to use OSS - "that it's free" - but as we all know here, OSS has many, many virtues that far outweigh the low cost, including vendor freedom, data transparency, program reliability, enthusiastic community, etc.
Martin
The product needs to integrate with Outlook. Transfer data back and forth (meetings, emails etc.).
I think one of the keys is to be realistic about what you're selling. So many times you need to ask yourself 'Would I pay this amount for this service?'.
I've just started writing some tutorials around using free software for creative design, and while I do expect to make some money (v. small) from advertising, I don't think I'll be able sell (m)any of the related files/t-shirts/etc that will go along with the site.
The software looks good: I logged in as demo and everthing seemed "as you'd expect" (in a good way). But some of the icons were a bit too general/small (like the one to add a candidate to a job). Just a thought.