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Louis Suarez-Potts Talks About Making Money with FOSS (Video)
Louis Suarez-Potts has been community manager for OpenOffice since it was sponsored by Sun Microsystems. He's still working with OpenOffice now that it's under the Apache Foundation umbrella. He also has a business going, along with several other long-time Free and Open Source boosters, called Age of Peers. They say it's "a collective forum for consultants, practitioners and boutique agencies, to collaborate on a bigger picture. We mix these ingredients in an organization built to foster collaboration, and harness creative cooperation into powerful new ideas." The company is focused on Open Source developers and companies, and often doesn't charge startups or individual developers for their services. They will be doing a live Google Hangout interview on March 5 that might give you some ideas about how to start, manage, and market an Open Source project -- even if you have no money to spend, which many people who have good ideas do not, at least when they get started. (Alternate video URL)
OT: I really like the icons on the old Slashdot. The beta version has no icons just pictures and it looks just like every other news site.
The only way I've known to really make serious coin on some FOSS project is to write the book.
Ok.. Yea, there are other ways, but it's the book writer we all remember.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
So for example if you’re doing Python, it might be reasonable to say go to a gaming community conference because that’s where a lot of Python people go.
But earlier it criticizes the commonly suggested business model for open source games, that of distributing the engine as free software and putting a paywall on the mission packs:
Nowadays it’s what some people would heavily criticize is that you can sell for example proprietary stuff that is built upon open source, so for example I can have an open source core, that then is have a glitzy enameled proprietary shell and people will then be able or want to use it and I’ll be making my money off the proprietary.
This is still the only way I can see to make money from a video game under a free software license. A video game doesn't require nearly as much support as business software, especially if it isn't MMO.
Once upon a time, there was an open source developer who published an open source project on GitHub and declared that he was going to make a lot of money from it. People were curious; how could he make any money from what he gave away for free? So they asked him what his secret was.
He thought a moment and said: "You too can be making money from your free software project. All you need is to become a consultant."
"Really?" exclaimed the people "We never thought of that! What do you consult about?"
"I consult companies on how to make money from their open source projects"
"Oooh. That's clever. Uh... but what do you use your OSS project for?"
"Sometimes those companies sometimes hire me to write something for them."
"Your OSS project?"
"Well, no. They usually want something different made."
"But it's open source, right?"
"Uh, no."
"So your advice is basically to put your OSS project on your resume so companies know you can code and then will give you a job?"
"Well, yes..."
"So you are not really making any money from your OSS project, you are just using it to get a job?"
"Uh..."
Hangouts videos need to go away like yesterday. They're amateurish at best and always sound horrid, plus no one ever does any cutting of them before posting them to the Internet, so they're needlessly lengthy and if they have interesting content it's lost in the sea of "uhhhh....ummm....paaaaaaaaause." *sigh* I couldn't get through a quarter of this video because it's just so freaking bad.
I mean, in modern music, the composer would be equivalent to the developer.
And the composer use to get frar less money than the most famous singers, instrumentalists showbiz people, hair stylists, managers and so on. So, the royalties given to the composer are perceived as an unfair payment for the creative minds of the business, isn't it?
Isn't the free software movement proposing something even more unfair for the creative minds of the software business?
They don't even have the right to the small royalties they have in music, free software evangelist claims such is unfair, and that the creative mind must turn himself/herself into a support guy, to make a living from trivial customizations or from writing books, or giving conferences, of anything besides the strictly creative process.
How come this approach is so popular in our field? Arent we shooting ourselves in the foot by convincing several entire country governments to go into the free software way?
So how would a game studio go about finding a patron who wants a Free game made? From everything I've seen, every patron that wants a game made wants the game to be proprietary because it's based on the patron's book, film, toy line, etc. that's likewise proprietary.
I like the business model that Schmooze/FreePBX has. It provides a free Linux distribution based on the Asterisk private branch exchange (PBX) VoIP telephony switch. It does about 80% of what a large company would want and pretty much what a SOHO would need. They have paid support for those that are serious about providing a telephony solution for a business.
The part that I really like is that in the pull-down menus, they have options for the paid modules which are disabled but instead are links to the specs with instructions to purchase. This is nice because you don't have to hunt all over the place to find a particular compatible module and you can easily see what is available. This form of advertising works for both Schmooze/FreePBX and the user.
They also provide weekly emails that indicate new features, howto articles and other tidbits.
Another good example is ClearOS and their "marketplace". ClearOS is a headless CentOS server that you can load up with whatever services that you need (web server, email, ftp, etc..) They have a free community edition and an enterprise edition. The basic modules are free and there are paid subscription modules. Some are very inexpensive like Zarafa - $10. You can't beat that! And of course you can pay for support.
To be fair, LibreOffice is doing a good job of fixing OpenOffice, but you have to look at how massive the task at hand really is. OO was designed to pull in Java for as much as it could, and the list of dependencies for OO is absolutely nuts. LO is better, and a prime long-term goal is to strip out all Java dependencies, but when you're trying to fix a complex program that has over a decade of a "let's pull Java in BECAUSE JAVA" mentality, it's going to take a monumental effort to fix the code base to not be a bloated suckfest. Microsoft Office is better, but LibreOffice has potential to get there eventually. In my estimation, the biggest problem with LibreOffice is that it really is pretty bad in terms of bloat. Calc on an old P4 laptop is barely usable; Excel 2007 on the same laptop is just fine.
If you want to point out an open source project that sucks hard, pick anything Lennart Poettering has had a major hand in (PulseAudio, systemd, and important programs GNOME 3 and udev that are forcing systemd dependencies despite massive outcry and a severe break from the UNIX philosophy that makes UNIX-like systems so great in the first place) and with a cursory search it won't take long to find out why they're so crappy and community-dividing in nature. LibreOffice is a bloated thing that needs a decent bit of CPU power to function, but systemd is slowly destroying core Linux software and is rapidly working as Red Hat's agent for its own embrace, extend and extinguish campaign.
I think you're correct in noticing that often F/OSS is used as a vehicle for companies to promote their products, like Java. The idea behind OO was as a demonstration of Java superiority. Obviously, that failed. It really should be abandoned and a new project started, but that's another story.
Interesting how you describe Red Hat engaging in a similar strategy. I guess it works. After all, there's still thousands of people out there making new Microsoft Office fans by recommending OO/LO, which as you mention is still a far ways off from being minimally competitive.
Futurist Traditionalism
All those years and you didn't try LO.
MS. Office is really not any more at the level of Libreoffice...
aaaaaaa
This article claims that Kickstarter is for studios that have "an already installed fanbase". How should a startup indie game studio build that first? If by building a substantial game or two and releasing it to the public without charge, then how should the studio find the funds to do that?
Perhaps you're using the Socratic method here
Nailed it. Thank you for having patience with me. A lot of other Slashdot users appear not to have patience for my methods. They tell me to just Google it without helping me through the thought process of coming up with keywords that produce relevant results, and Google isn't especially good at determining the reliability or obsoleteness of a source anyway.
Or just suck it up and work for somebody else for a while.
I'm doing that, but "somebody else" in my city happens not to be in the video game industry. I'd first have to fund a relocation to Austin, Texas, or another city with a video game industry, and that's the point where other Slashdot users usually stop being willing to help me.
Mods
After MDY v. Blizzard?
flash games
I assume I'd get around the $239.88 per year Adobe tax with FlashDevelop and the Flex SDK. (Source: Google flash games without flash)
smaller mobile apps.
A problem with mobile games is that iOS and Android devices don't ship with a directional control. Sure, I can tap the lower right corner of the screen to jump, but when I tried a game with an on-screen gamepad (the Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure demo) on my first-generation Nexus 7 tablet, I couldn't get a hang of the controls because I couldn't feel where my left thumb was relative to the on-screen controls.
Well, I can't say much about your personal situation. Just like the usual Ask Slashdot articles, I (and most slashdot users) focus on generalities
I'm aware of the preference for generalities, as opposed to the kind of thing that Stack Exchange sites call "too localized". That's why I was trying to phrase it in terms of the generality of anybody relocating for the first time.
if it's about building a fanbase, being sued may in fact be a boon, as you'll become "that famous guy who wrote the cool mod but got totally reamed by evil EVIL Activision-Blizzard"
Or "that guy who has no respect for intellectual property", which might cause one to end up on an industry blacklist. I have removed projects from my web site in the past once I became aware of case law that contradicted my own lay interpretation of copyright statutes.
That mobile game about that flappish birdish thing, which didn't use console style controls, succeeded attracting a following to its developer, and then some.
Why did it succeed for Dong Nguyen and not for Sunflat (SFCave) or Zanorg (Piou Piou), who made the same game earlier? I've heard the App Store referred to as a casino.