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How to make money with open source software
steve_brody writes "IBM has published this new article in its Linux developerWorks Zone on how to turn your open source expertise into cash. Also includes a summary of different licenses, if you are considering copyrighting (or copylefting) your software. "
I'm a contractor with IBM and everyone here loves Linux. I've discussed it briefly with some management people and there was NEVER a snicker or even a hint that they thought Linux was a toy.
My last stint was at (unnamed travel and charge card company), and if I mentioned Linux the first thing out of the managers' pieholes was "how can we make money using Linux?" All of them thought that if Microsoft couldn't make money off Linux, then neither could they. Silly little me thought that (company) was in the traveller check business, not the operating system sales business. Heh heh!
The difference between those two jobs is night and day. IBM really gets it, and it's truly a pleasure working for a company that is on the right track.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Well, it's not.
When you're in school, or when you're writing software in your copious spare time, then there's really no cost to develop the software, and so just about any money you can make off of it is a profit, and life's good. But if you're out in the real world, needing to make a real living, things are much, much harder. When I look at the options available to me -- and I produce several free software packages with a respectable user base -- it's crystal clear that making a living requires me to be doing fully commercial software, either for someone else's company or starting my own.
So why do the current efforts not work? Primarily because they fail basic market economics. Man time is very expensive, especially for a good programmer. A fully commercial software effort can pay the programmer at a certain rate for his time. The methods of making money with free software are usually -- not always, but usually -- paying a lot less for your time than the rest of the market would. When we're talking about paying the rent and buying food, the difference between one rate of pay and the other is not to be taken lightly.
Look at the current money-for-free-software web sites that have been set up. "I want a driver for XYZ high-end undocumented component. Must be fully functional and reliable. $100." Come now. Do the math; that's below minimum wage. Even projects that are willing to pay $10,000 -- which are very rare so far -- are usually pathetic when you consider the dollars per unit time. Oh, then there's the minor detail that you might not actually collect the money.
This really is a sad state of affairs, and is a problem that must be fixed. Too many free software projects are so big now, both in terms of the code's complexity and in terms of how many people rely on that code, that they need multiple humans working full-time on them in order to remain viable. But there just isn't money right now to pay those people for their time at anything approaching a competitive rate.
Meanwhile, you better believe that companies like IBM are embracing free software. They get all the profits at a dramatic reduction in costs. This is not a hard bit of math. Who wins? The customer wins -- they get better software. Companies like IBM win -- they get more profits. The free software authors... uh...