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."
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.
1. manufacture controversy
2. ???
3. Proffitt?!
Balderdash!
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
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.
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.
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.
You got moderated flamebait, but that seems to be a placeholder because there is no moderation option for 'just plain wrong'. You categorically can make money from open source software - I do. The difference is that you make money from writing it, not from copying it. If you write something that ever gets to the state of being feature-complete and bug free (and comes with a free unicorn) then you probably can't make any money from it, but why should you? It doesn't need improving in any way, so what would you do to justify the money? Until then, there are people who need specific bugs fixed and people who need specific features added, and they'll pay someone to do this. That person may not be the original author - one of the reasons why open source software is often cheaper is that there is competition - but someone will make money from adding those features and fixing those bugs. In a large project, that will be a lot of people.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The people who do the real work don't.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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).
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.
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.
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.
You seem to be missing the reason why most software is written in the first place. It's not done because someone wants to make money, it's done because someone wants to use the resulting code. This accounts for 100% of the open source code I've worked on. Some projects I've started because no one else provided the tools I wanted. Some projects other people started and I've contributed to because it's easier than rewriting everything.
Clang is a good example: it was started because Apple wanted a modular [Objective-]C[++] front end that could be used in a compiler, in refactoring tools, for syntax highlighting, and so on. My first contribution was to support the GNU Objective-C ABI - something of no use to Apple, but a great deal of use to me. I didn't get paid for this directly, but having a decent compiler for Objective-C stuff on Linux/*BSD has helped me get paid for other stuff. I've since done paid work on clang for other companies that needed other features implemented, or other systems supported.
Clang wasn't started in the hope that its authors would be able to get people to pay, it was started because its authors' employer needed it. It was open sourced because that helped reduce the cost of development for everyone involved. Apple probably could have kept it proprietary and developed in house, but then companies like Google and ARM, and individuals like myself, wouldn't have contributed anything, so their costs would have been higher.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News