Ask Slashdot: Viable Open Source Models For Early Startups?

New submitter rchoetzlein writes "I am a software developer working independently for five years on various projects, and preparing to go public with my first product. Everyone is telling me I should make it open source. I would love to, but I just don't see how an early startup can afford to become profitable on service alone. My projects are no longer small-scale hobbies, they are large frameworks, and I need to make a living. Any ideas on business models that would allow me to open source while guaranteeing I can feed myself?"

Comments

This is how our start-up handles it

[ExpertCoder]

A few years we were in the same position as you are. We wanted to open source some of our technology and software but were trying to figure out how to make it work. Eventually we decided to offer both proprietary version of our software, and open source one. They are fairly identical and we offer support services for both.

The trick is, to ensure that we would convert the open source users to paying ones, we made most of the software features to do the heavy work on our servers, and then would strip the code altogether from the open source version. If users wanted to use the program they would for all practicality need to buy an yearly support contract from us, which included access to the servers hosting the code. On top of that we introduced various bugs and weird failures to the open source version, which would mean that the open source users would call our premium priced support telephone number. We needed to fine tune this over the year a bit , as we didn't introduce enough bugs in the beginning. But later we would start getting lots of support calls for bugs and it made a good amount of money.

This also made quite many sales of the proprietary version, so in overall it worked quite well. You might want to try something similar.