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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
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..."
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.
All those years and you didn't try LO.
MS. Office is really not any more at the level of Libreoffice...
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