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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?"
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
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
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
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.
I run the Symphony OS project (http://www.symphonyos.com/) in what free time I have. In the last year since the project has grown a bit the best month of donations we have had was about $95. That was with one person donating $50.
Over the last year the project has received maybe $300 between cd sales and donations. Out of my pocket for servers and other expenses in running the project (not counting time) I have spent about $2000.
I am sure once we have a more stable release dontations will improve and I dont blame people for not donating to an unstable project, but even with a stable project I dont think donations is any kind of a way to make a profit. At best it helps offset the money you spend to keep your project going.
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
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.
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
I am working on an installer right now. Frankly I had very little expectation that it would be picked by slashdot. It was one of those strange days when you get up really early for no apparent reason...and start goofing off...I fired up the browser and submitted the story to slashdot. Didn't put too much thought in to it. You are right, I could have waited a bit more and have a more polished version. I think the source code should be out in another few weeks.
Take a look at Sendmail.org and Sendmail.com - one corporate and one OSS.
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
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