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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?"
I work for a pizza company.
We have a company that handles all of our tech stuff for us. By tech stuff I mean the national call center that sends the orders to the store over the internet via VPN, and all of that good stuff. It's all running on Red Hat, and we pay them to help us train new people, set up new systems, and fix things when they break.
I don't know if that works for you, but it's one way that Open Source software is being used.
hehe, well done guys.
How we know is more important than what we know.