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Open Source Payday
itwbennett writes "The recent Slashdot discussion on the open source community's attitude on profits neglected an important point: 'no profits' doesn't mean 'no money.' There are plenty of open source not-for-profit organizations that take in millions of dollars in order to pursue their public-minded missions, and some pay their employees handsomely. Brian Proffitt combed through the latest publicly available financial information on 18 top FLOSS organizations to bring you the cold, hard numbers."
Working on FOSS or commercial, its good to know your value. On commercial, I have a dollar value on mine. RS
Brian Proffitt should shut up and stop trying to manufacture some kind of controversy over absolutely nothing controversial or even notable.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The source article mispells H. Peter Anvin as "Alvin" where he's listed for "The Linux Kernel Organization". I normally wouldn't have cared but for all the times I've seen his name on various Linux bootloaders...he's kind of a big deal. :)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
If I need a new electrical socket, I may hire an electrician to put one in. I pay him some money.
Yet, the specs of the socket, the wiring, how to connect them all up are easily available and in the public domain, for free. After he's connected the socket, I can see his work, I could even copy it to add my own socket in another room.
The electrician would be paid money for what he did. He does not fit sockets out of 'love'!!
Why should Open Source software development be any different?
As long we can obtain the source code for free (as in both beer and freedom) does anyone care if someone found a way to make a profit off it?
I would much rather give a company selling FOSS related products so they could profit over someone else.
Cant buy me looooovvvvveeeee! Looooovvvvveeee! ~ Beatles
I'm quite sure Robert Love will be happy to do a consulting gig for you for a fee.
Ezekiel 23:20
Non-profit doesn't mean that they can not make profit. It is just that they can not make greedy profit as capitalistic corporations does. Non-profit allows profit up to 5% or what is ethically correct.
TFS claims that plenty of projects take in millions of dollars. And then points to an article that list 7 (about half) that take in at least a million dollars. And these projects have thousands of volunteers. Sure a handful of people are taking home some bacon. But the majority of the people contributing are not.
You find a number of people like OSS not because it is free as in speech but because they don't want to pay for anything. They don't tend to claim that is the reason, of course, but it is. I've met more than a couple people that were big OSS heads and claimed it was all about freedom of the code (though they never did anything with it themselves) but were completely opposed to the idea of paying for any software.
How they expected developers to put food on the table I'm not sure.
Doh. Generating income is not the same as generating profits.
Take 5 of the most grating bugs collated from any Slashdot project discussion, particular those which are often compared to 'the leading (non-floss) brand.' Imagine 5 programmers hired FULL TIME every year to work on each respective area. Subtract an average programmer's salary times 5 from (the top few, with some assumptions in data) salaries occupied in the upper management echelon.
A simple calculation shows which management figureheads understand the long term role of floss in public technology. You can either believe 100% in the war or choose the liberty of a 'private view'. No matter the absolute level of funding an organisation receives, the according effect on the future will be exponential. This is how the character of project members must be understood.
I work for a for-profit company. What the boss decides to do with the software is none of my buisiness - I still need to put food on the table.
If I worked at a company who's target was not to make profit - I still would need to eat if its my full-time job. Just that at the end of the day(year) the company won't cut a big check to shareholders.
I have no problem with non-profits making money - if you don't have fulltime developers the company will collapse sooner rather than later.
...as the article seems to show that while there is certainly *some* money in FOSS, unless you're the top exec you probably won't be seeing any of it.
Gah!!!
I guess I'm being voted flamebait or troll for this, but someone's got to say it.
The only problem with FLOSS is that you can't make money with with two exceptions: (1) You can earn money if your software is sufficiently complicated; in that case you get money mostly for support work and maintaining the software, not from selling the software itself. (2) You can earn money by making the software FLOSS, but using obscure languages, build systems, or distributing the source in a way that makes it almost impossible for anyone else to build it.
Both (1) and (2) works only with highly complex software involving a lot of know how. With anything else you cannot make money. That's a fact and it's kind of annoying that some FLOSS aficionados try to constantly deny it. A perfect example is AdaCore, who gave one of the most hypocritical talks I've ever heard on Fosdem 2012. Basically, AdaCore works because of (1)&(2), particularly (2), because their GPL edition forces you to put every program you compile under GPL, whereas the FSF GNAT edition with MGPL lacks essential tools (AdaCore doesn't provide them...), is about 2-3 years behind, and contains numerous bugs fixed in newer releases. Notice also that (1) is inherently bad, because it means that a FLOSS developer is more likely to make money with his software the less it is usable out of the box/without training.
I'm a big fan of FLOSS and also contribute to it myself, but someone has to say the truth. You cannot make money with ordinary end-consumer software under the free software model. That's why I think that the shareware model is still a viable route to go even if it means that the software remains proprietary. Perhaps releasing libraries under LGPL and keeping the end product proprietary is the right way for small companies. Of course, RMS, whom I respect very much, will disagree.
The fact that you see so many posts about business models and profits in regards to open source strikes me as a case of the lady protesting too much.
Trying so hard to convince people about how profitable open source can be just makes me think that money IS really THAT hard to come by when going the open source route. If it weren't the case, then the monetary opportunities provided by open source would be obvious to all and there would be no need for all these posts about it over the years.
there are aspects of 'non profit' where there are no profits because the directors pay themselves such large salaries that there's (strangely!) no cash left over each year. I don't consider these non-profit at all.
eg. from TFA:
the Mozilla Foundation generated the highest compensation levels for Baker and Eich who, while receiving no direct salary from the Mozilla Foundation, were compensated $589,953 each from "reportable compensation from related organizations" and "estimated amount of other compensation from the [Mozilla Foundation] and related organizations."
"Related organizations," in this instance, is the Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that generates much of the Foundation's revenue.
With a revenue of $1,934,659, the Mozilla Foundation ranked fourth of the eighteen FLOSS-related non-profits researched for this report. But with a net cash flow loss of $1,333,815 for the 2010 fiscal year, the Mozilla Foundation was next to last on money lost for the year.
so, basically Mozilla Corp pays Mozilla Foundation cash to make stuff that the corp then sells/advocates/etc. Only the foundation sat on a net loss of $1.3m, yet the corp paid its 2 directors $1.2m..... hmm.
Now I don't mind the directors making a reasonable amount of money from the situation, we all got to eat after all, but I'd say a more reasonable remuneration would be more like $100k, not nearly 600k. And I totally disagree with directors sucking the non-profit cash-cow dry.
The people who do the real work don't.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Saying things to make the subject go away avoids useful investigation. As usual, the money needs understanding.
For example, Mozilla Foundation is a rich, rich corporation. No one should make the mistake of thinking that work on Firefox is done mostly by volunteers.
But where does all the money go? Did you see $78.6 million worth of improvements in Firefox in 2008?
Did you see improvements suggesting that Mozilla Foundation had $168 million in assets in 2010? -- (Official PDF file, see page 2. Numbers are in thousands, as it says at the top of the page.)
Firefox is a world-class asset. No other browser has all the features. There is no substitute for the capabilities of Firefox together with Firefox add-ons. (Mozilla Foundation calls one thing by 3 names: Add-ons, extensions, and plug-ins.)
But Firefox is unstable. Firefox instabilities are experienced most frequently by those who open many Firefox windows and tabs, and leave them open while putting the computer into standby or hibernation several times. That is the pattern of use of those who do a lot of online research. The crashes and memory gobbling have been reported for more than 10 years, since version 0.9 of Mozilla Suite, before Mozilla began using the name Firefox. Firefox is still unstable even though the change reports for almost every version say there have been "stability improvements".
Firefox crash info:
about:crashes
Put about:crashes into your URL bar and press ENTER. Firefox will then show a list of crashes of the copy of Firefox on that computer.
Crash info for all users and all versions:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox
Crashes per 100 active daily users, version 10.0, the version before the most recent:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox/versions/10.0
Version 11 is less stable. Crashes per 100 active daily users, version 11.0, the most recent version:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox/versions/11.0
Top crashers, version 11.0:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byversion/Firefox/11.0/14
Notes:
1) The lists of crashes are ONLY the ones that Firefox caught and that were submitted. The lists do NOT include crashes that did't start the crash reporter. The lists do NOT include crashes that weren't submitted to Mozilla Foundation.
2) The crashes are often preceded by rapidly increasing memory use. Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started. When Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows it often damages operations in Windows that are not connected with browsing.
Seriously, just stop. The FLOSS community hates to pay money and thinks no one should make any money from software. All one has to do is look at comments on Slashdot to see that.
Well, I'm going to lose the moderation point that I just used, but I have to reply to this.
Dude, you can't judge the way the FLOSS community thinks because of the comments on Slashdot. First, because you will have to prove first that Slashdot is a non-biased sample of the community. Second, because normally the comments on one news entry are the reaction to that event, not a proper statement from such community.
And if you want more, here is one small piece of evidence: 9000€ collected in 3 months to fund Nepomuk. Nepomuk is one of the most hated and/or more controversial pieces of KDE 4.x. From what I read on the KDE related sites, lists, etc., many people are quite vocal in stating that they don't want Nepomuk and want to disable it, or get rid of it as a forced dependency. And still got some love in the form of money.
Oh, and remember the figures from the Humble Indie Bundle: Linux users of the bundle paid (a lot) more on average that Mac or Windows users.
When Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows it often damages operations in Windows that are not connected with browsing.
That Windows allows itself to be corrupted in a way that survives killing firefox.exe is the fault of Microsoft (for defective Windows code) or of hardware manufacturers (for defective driver code).
Take Samsung for instance. Just about all of their devices like smart tvs run on the Linux kernel for dick all cash. Yet the jerks do not even include support for flac. Neither do they give out the code to allow FOSS for their allshare interface to the devices to have Linux ports. You buy their TV or BD player it shows the GPL licence and when you go into the store all you see on their devices is that they are JAVA powered ...which is essentially bullshit because they are running a VM on a Busy-box kernel.
So the truth is that there are a great many getting rich from open source and the programmers that created it are essentially ignored. Hell they even use ffmpeg if you look at the licence info. The average joe hasn't got a clue as to what is really going on. The Linux kernel and open source have become an engine for the consumer electronics industry. Sony, LG, Samsung and others are dependant upon the fact that embedded open source software keeps them from having to pay Steve Ballmer a cent. It is time for us to start educating the consumer as to what open source really is.
After all, for most software the major part of the value comes from all the other lemmings.
Belittling people who see value in purchasing non-free software
That's not how I read Jens Egon's comment. I understood it more as a positive network externality: "Microsoft Word and Excel are valuable because they let you collaborate on documents and spreadsheets with other users of Microsoft Word and Excel." Multiplayer video games are the same way.
I don't want to buy software if there's a perfectly good OSS alternative available.
What's your opinion on income tax return preparation tools? Even if the engine is free, Intuit and H&R Block treat their machine-readable interpretations of this year's amendments to the U.S. Internal Revenue Code and the 50 states' respective tax codes as a valuable trade secret and thus have no business case to make their products free software.
I tend to now buy games and media more than tools, so long as the games are cross-platform and the media is non-DRMed.
Except for the fact that a lot of games that aren't FPS, RTS, or MMORPG aren't cross-platform; they're either Wii exclusive, Xbox 360 exclusive, PS3 exclusive, or for 360+PS3 with no PC version. Even those games with a PC port are often crippled, with multiple gamepad multiplayer getting cut out. And as for media, since when have the Hollywood studios distributed a movie in any digital format (disc, downloadable, or streaming) without digital restrictions management?
There are good patterns:
- agile software projects with a community driving it
- heavier software projects with for-profit support (they pay people to work on OSS)
and bad patterns:
- bloated software projects with the purpose of driving other for-profit company
- marketing/speculative enterprises looking to whore out OSS
- confused OSS projects, managed by boards full of for-profit money nerds, that want to be "players" in technology
(my opinions, of course)
If you look at those categories, its very easy to go down that list and pick out which project is what kind.
Take the example of a video game. A single-player or non-massively multiplayer video game is supposed to be feature-complete upon release; any big new features are supposed to go into the sequel so as not to break game play balance. So once a video game is reasonably bug-free, it gets to the point of "doesn't need improving in any way" apart from keeping it compatible with changes to the underlying platform, so where's the money to develop a sequel?
Either from the consumer or the author's standpoint. The real problem is with software that is complex and expensive to develop but, if done right, easy to use. There's little to no ability to sell support on it if you do it right because it is easy to use, well documented, and so on. So you aren't going to make money trying to sell support contracts. However you also can't rely on good will. If you need to spend $10 million to write the stuff you'd better have a way to make that money back. However it isn't feasible for a customer to plunk down that kind of cash, and if it was they very well might wish to own the resulting code.
As an example: I need video editing software at work. None of the OSS solutions are remotely close to capable of what they need to do. So, commercial software it is. We can afford to drop $500 for Sony Vegas (and did). We can't afford to pay developers to fix up the OSS out there because it would cost a lot, given that it would be a ton of work to get what we want, and of course there's no guarantees they could get the job done.
Well Sony has to charge for Vegas, because it took a substantial team a good amount of time to write the stuff (not to mention shit they had to license). They can't afford to give it away and hope people will give them money either to be nice, or for new features. Frankly I wouldn't because it has all the features I want that I'd be willing to pay for.
I'm not saying it is a model that can never work, but there are many cases where it isn't workable.
So then when you wish to charge for the development, how do you do it? Well by breaking it down in to small amounts that each person pays. You sell it for a price people are willing to pay, and sell enough copies and you make your investment back and make a profit.
Same shit is done with physical goods. When you buy a CPU you aren't just paying for the production cost, you are paying R&D. That's why even after you account for all the markups and so on you find the cost doesn't match. The reason is there's hidden cost in there. You pay the marginal AND the R&D. For Software there is a low marginal but there's still the R&D.
misspells
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
The overall issue is this: Non-profit organizations sometimes make a LOT of profit.
Another: The Open Source Initiative: $40,334.00 a year revenue. This is some kind of a joke, right?
If this is the top 18, don't bother with the bottom 999,982. It's not worth the electrons.
Apple makes 10x as much per day as the all the "Top 18" combined do in a year.
Heck, even Angry Birds makes more than twice as much as all of them combined.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Because it effectively killed the worst Linux desktop (GNOME 2) in order to fight off its competitor, Canonical.
There, fixed that for you.
I thought the point of "free" software was that you are free to obtain the source code. Not that it's no cost. Whatever the distribution charge, someone pays for it, even if that payment is in the form of time donated to the project.
I find it interesting that most of these projects are in fact losing money. Given the level of effort and the quality of the software that is being written, I wish that there was real pay days associated with the projects, but from what I can tell no one is making much money.
Math
And if you want more, here is one small piece of evidence: 9000€ collected in 3 months to fund Nepomuk
Nepomuk is a desktop framework that cost 17 million euros to develop. And they raised 9000 over 3 months?! That's only 3k/mo... not even enough to hire 1 developer. And you expect that one person to maintain an entire desktop framework?!
If they can keep that up, in just 472 years they will have collected enough to pay for the initial development costs.
more importantly, non profits doesn't mean that the organzizaion doesn't make profits... non-profit is simply a tax designation that says "profits aren't our first motivation", and in exchange get slightly different tax considerations under the law, especially in regards to 'gifted contributions'. Every organization must make at least as much as it spends, or it dies. whats leftover from year to year is the profit.
Every time someone talks about Firefox instability, someone else gives excuses. In this case, Mozilla Foundation changed the Firefox version number more than once a month and broke a lot of the extensions. That should not be listed as an excuse, as the parent comment does, it should be listed as a fault of Mozilla Foundation management.
Mozilla Foundation
Top 20 Excuses
for Not Fixing the
Firefox Memory and CPU Hogging bugs
These are actual excuses given at one time or another. They are not all the excuses, just the top 20.
1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly build. [The same memory and CPU hogging bug has been reported many, many times over a period of seven years.]
2) Yes, this bug exists, but other things are more important. [The bug eventually takes 100% of CPU power, and makes Windows XP unusable, even after Firefox is killed. The bug affects the heaviest users of Firefox.]
3) Yes, this bug exists, but it is not a common occurrence. [Numerous users have reported the bug. See the links.]
4) Works for me. [The bug is complicated to reproduce, so the developers did a simplified test, which didn't show the bug.]
5) No one has posted a TalkBack report. [If they had read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too, or a TalkBack report is not generated. TalkBack does not generate a report if Firefox is hogging the CPU. TalkBack cannot generate a report if the bug takes 100% of the CPU time.]
6) If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug. [They didn't bother to reproduce the bug using the detailed information provided.]
7) This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. [The other bugs aren't specified.]
8) You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. [But the same use does not crash any version of Opera.]
9) I don't like the way you worded your bug report. [So, he didn't read it or think about it.]
10) You should run a debugger and find what causes this problem yourself. [Then when you have done most of the work, tell us what causes the problem, and we may fix it.]
11) Many bugs that are filed aren't important to 99.99% of the users.
12) If you are saying bad things about Mozilla and Firefox, you must be trolling. [They say this even though Firefox and Mozilla instability is beginning to be reported in media such as Information Week. See the links to magazine articles in this Slashdot comment: Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.]
13) Your problem is probably caused by using extensions. [These are extensions advertised on the Firefox and Mozilla web site, and recommended.]
14) Your problem is probably caused by a corrupt profile. [The same bug has been reported many times over a period of five years. One of the reports discusses an extensive test in both Linux and Windows that used a completely clean installation of the operating systems, not just a clean profile. The CPU hogging bug and instability was just as severe.]
15) If you are technically knowledgeable, you can spend several hours (or days) trying to discover the problem: Standard diagnostic - Firefox. [Firefox has "Standard Diagnostics". It has become accepted that some users will have severe problems. !!! ]
16) I won't actually read the (many) bug reports, but I will give you some complicated technical speculation. [This pretends to be helpful but, on investigation, is shown to have nothing to do with the bugs.]
17) It's understandable that Firefox developers become defensive when users report so many problems.
18) To spend smart developers' time going over reports of bugs generated by analysis tools would be a waste. [There have been 3 anal
First, note that my reply was to a post that claimed that "[t]he FLOSS community hates to pay money". I wasn't writing about how much, but I gave some evidence (not definitive, but some) that this wasn't true.
Second, the link that you posted seems to be about the much larger super set that includes the KDE-related Nepomuk. I don't understand the full stack, not even the subset or implementation that includes the KDE-related technologies. But if you check out the page about the pieces released as open source, you will see that they claim that not the whole project is open source, and Nepomuk-KDE (the project that was asking for funding) is only one part. I haven't found many references, but an article on KDE news gives some pointers and explanation. So I think that your comparison is not accurate. The larger project includes many implementations and lots of research. Now we are talking about a single implementation that is more or less done, but needs features and bug fixing.
Third, I wasn't the one setting the milestone. Sebastian Trüg, the lead Nepomuk developer did, and he claimed it was a reasonable amount to "secure long-term funding for Nepomuk". I guess that if he started the fundraiser on September of 2011, and he finally joined a regular company on February 2012, it was enough to live with some dignity during some months (he was working for Mandriva previously, and it seems the financial troubles of the company forced him and other employees to work without a salary). I don't know about the living expenses in every corner of the world, but I can tell you that in Spain, I would be terribly happy if I could dedicate myself to work full time on my favorite project for 3000€ before taxes per month. If I'm not mistaken, many programmers are working here for about 1200€ per month after taxes, maybe even less. With a 23% of people unemployed, I don't expect salaries to be much higher in some time.
So how does one build "a solid portfolio of past works" with production values exceeding those of a one-man hobbyist effort without moving to Austin, Boston, or Seattle?
I wasn't writing about how much, but I gave some evidence (not definitive, but some) that this wasn't true
I suggest you look up the phrase "Daming with faint praise". If they didn't hate to pay money, there would be much more, and you completely ignore that. The fact is that if they didn't hate to pay, they would be paying much more and Nepomuk would have pulled in much more. Instead, you have proven my point for me.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I guess FLOSS supporters don't like hearing the truth.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Firefox 11 doesn't seem to be corrupting my Xubuntu 11.10, though I'm using an Intel GMA. Perhaps it's a defect in a non-free AMD or NVIDIA driver.
IMHO
#include $SalesTrainingCourse
will solve a lot of problems. Seriously, devs are intelligent people. Sales and business are algorithmic. Add this precious skill and make money from OSS
clue: SaaS
Let's not get away from the main subject.
Mozilla Foundation makes more than $100 million a year, paid by Google to make Google the default search engine in Firefox. Where does that money go?
That's not $100 million total, that's $100 million each year.
There is a LOT to be learned in analyzing the profitability of open source software organizations.
I've never been a big fan of doing open source development work, and these numbers tell me I made the right choice. I never really understood why people are fans of doing open source work. I'm happy to use it, of course - not because I think it's better, but because it generally works well enough (though often not as well as paid programs), but it's big advantage is that it's free. I couldn't care less about being able to change the source code - it's often a pain in the ass to get projects to build in the first place.
Anyway, I did a little math and figured out that Microsoft brings in more revenue in 90 minutes (about $10 million in 90 minutes) than any of these projects bring in each year. How dismal. I also know of one pro-piracy advocate (who I won't do the favor of naming) who always argues that 'if people like your work, they'll donate because people want to support the projects they like!' - in other words, give away your work for free and people will spontaneously give you money so you don't lose anything by piracy or giving it away for free. These numbers paint a very different picture.
I'm using the open-source radion driver.
Have you tried reporting the problem with your combination of Firefox version, Linux distribution version, and video card driver to bugzilla.mozilla.org?