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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?"
Sell support. If you want to sell your product per see, then you can't go Open Source. Why all the ideological bullshit about Open Source ? What kind of idea behind Open Source does your boss like ? The fact that he can get free programmers ? I doesn't work that way. Maybe you want a shared source license with your customers.
Pretend in every way that the software is not open source and people will start see no difference, except perhaps that the open source quality is higher... which is debatable...
Don't obfuscate the product with geeky crap like, "this program is a java program that is thread safe." No one cares unless they're a developer and even still you'd be lucky if they cared. Keep it simple. Say what the product does and why it's good at it (as in design, not ideology!) and let it speak for itself.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean you should be given a medal and a paycheck...
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
``How Do You Make a Profit While Using Open Source?''
Simple. I run my company on open source software. The software costs me no money. The services I sell bring in money. Profit!
As for making a profit from _writing_ open source software; that's a little harder. I could see the software being a loss leader for selling other things, like manuals or support contracts.
If you want to make a profit purely on writing the software itself, you will have to find one or more parties who are willing to pay for development and accept that the code they paid for may be used by others. Given that the others might contribute improvements, this may actually be an advantage, so you may be able to find such parties.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
But humans also behave irrationally. Sometimes closed source is a good idea, because humans are irrational. I think that's where I agree with you. For instance, if you own a business doing embedded programming for some boring widget, it would be difficult to gain a financial advantage by open sourcing your code and hoping the community would contribute.
However, humans also behave irrationally the other way. Take patent-holding companies like NTP, for example, whose sole existence is to file suits based on their patent portfolio. The cost to our whole society of a patent reform is enormous, and possibly the only way we can move past such things as submarine patents and the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the Microsoft/Novell partnership.
Leaving the economics alone, there's an enormous sea-change happening here. Evidence includes the Microsoft/Novell partnership. If even the largest, most profitable company to ever exist is threatened by the Free Software Foundation (okay, I know that some would debate this, but for the sake of argument, think about this) -- then this could be very significant. I've heard it said by other
But the change is more than just "a chicken in every pot / a source tarball for every binary."
Think about the implication of the internet, its ability to spread the information which is publicly available. More than that, the internet, and even slashdot, are places where useful information seems to rise to the top. Because most people are rational most of the time, the trolls and flamebait sink and information is distilled. Open source software existed before the internet, but without the community effect, its pace was measured in decades instead of weekends.
Open source, file sharing, slashdot and the other blogs, VOIP, IPTV, piracy, viruses, and so many other things are examples of this community. I'm really trying to avoid the buzzwords of the
I think the real question facing individuals, business, and governments is simply this: If we all actually sat down and traded what we have for no cost, so that we all had access to the same resources, what could we accomplish? Would we benefit? Or would the Kim Jong Ils of the world build a nuke and turn us all into flamebait?