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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?"
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
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
I guess that to be successful in both, you have to sell pretty boxes and offer commercial support. It's the techies who'll chose your product but it's the PHB who'll have to approve. Without a boxed product and paid support, they will probably refuse. With it, they might not even know it's open source (but the tech people will, that's what matters).
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
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?
because I haven't quite figured out the "money making" aspect of it yet. I am reading/reviewing the available open source licenses to see what will work best for. So far a derivative of MPL seemed to be the most promising option... Asim
You could start a succesful buisness off open source if you made something the people really needed and you had a good business model to coincide...if you're making "me too" open source code, then you probably will have a hard time. Another good place to try is in game creation. You can make your entire game open source, but keep the content of it proprietary (art, music, levels, etc). Once again...if you can make a product that people geniunely want, regardless of if it's open source or not, then you could very easily have success.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
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
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