Slashdot Mirror
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."
Brian Proffitt has a long history of Fox News-style articles with idiotic "questions" he is trying to attach to open source developers and open source software in general. This is clearly one of them.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.