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Miguel de Icaza's startup
El Volio writes "Yahoo is running a story about Miguel de Icaza's new company, focusing on GNOME software development." The new company's called "Helix Code", although that name's temporary. The plan is for all the products to be given away for free, and then charge for support, a common revenue model.
The title of this comment may be a little facetious, but for the most part it's true. Most home office users don't buy support contracts, either. Not even all small offices do, unless it comes with the site license.
The entire "give the software away for free and charge for support" concept--it seems to me--came from people used to the traditional market for Unix software and applications: enterprise customers, research facilities and universities. In those markets, commercial software is supported constantly by the vendor. It's most of what you're paying for--you're more or less buying the support for $20,000 (or whatever) a year and that includes "free" updates to the systems you've purchased. In this environment, charging for support for open source software is pretty natural.
In home and SOHO environments, though, this model is unprecedented, in a canonical sense of the term. Some software comes with 90 days of free technical support, and some companies have a "knowledge base" of software. And that's it.
The question is: are people really crying out to change that? Don't give me a "yes" answer too fast. Even most newbie Linux users are net-savvy enough to find a newsgroup to ask for support on or to use Red Hat's free knowledge base, and anyone can manage to get to their local Borders and pick up "Linux for Dummies."
And this is just for the operating system, which is generally the most complex piece of a desktop OS. The chances are that most users aren't going to have any problems with a desktop app that require a support contract--they might have trouble with installation, but that's it. Nearly anything else they can ask a friend, find a web page, get a book, post a message on a news group, and so on.
At risk of sounding doom-and-gloom, this is a problem I see with the entire "give it away" philosophy. Flame if you will, but as has been observed before, all software has development costs associated with it; the free software world has had the fortune that most of those costs have effectively been eaten by universities and a select few companies.
When you try to make money by starting commercial projects as open source, though, they need to end up paying their way somehow. Red Hat and Linux distributors to date have essentially sold neither software nor support, they've sold convenience. Red Hat wants to move to a subscription-based model, it seems, and that's understandable--each "unofficial Red Hat" CD someone buys with no support is an indirect material harm to their business. (Again, that sounds harsh, but if you sell at a profit margin of 50% and 60% of your potential customers get your product without giving you money for it, you're losing money.)
But can that really work for a "desktop application"? I'm not sure that it can't... but I'm not convinced that it can, either.