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How Do You Make a Profit While Using Open Source?
rjst01 asks: "I work for a small company that sells an advanced engineering product targeted at a small niche. We have about 600 customers worldwide and our software is available in 3 languages, soon to be 4. My boss loves the idea of Open Source, and would very much like to release our software under an open source license. But, we're unable to find a working business model appropriate to such a small customer base, that won't result in us achieving anything other than destroying our revenue stream. The fact that our software is in an obscure language (think embedded programming) doesn't help. Can anyone suggest a business model that allows us to open source our software while continuing to make a profit?"
It just says you can't put restrictions on how they use it or the code.
Well, I hold a similar opinion to the US Government, until there is more than one supplier for X, it's never going to be sensible to go with X over something else for which there is already multiple suppliers. I'm sure a lot of other people share this opinion, so opening your software so that more than just your company can provide support for that software is likely to result in a huge increase in your market.
How we know is more important than what we know.
PyMOL has an Open Source tool, but the manual is not really free for use, although it's browseable online. Where I work, they wanted to use the software, and I realized that we really couldn't quite do it legally without buying a subscription, which I told the money people, and they ante'd up. This is a pretty good model--you want the stuff to be free for the people who can't pay, and there to be just enough legal nip to cause those who can pay to decide that it's more reasonable to do so. http://pymol.sourceforge.net/
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."