Great developers often generate more income when they work for themselves where nobody would look over their shoulder and tell them how to do things. They become the CEO of their own company within few years, vs. if they work for another company, they may never get that opportunity.
Knowing that, if they don't work "for" anybody, they are often more than happy to work "with" other teams as collaborators as long as they get to have direct communication with the clients and stake holders and the opportunity to participate in all the decision making process. Great developers despise command chains and management hierarchies and instead prefer to work in flat team structures.
Remember: It is always easier for the Hackers to learn about business than Business people to learn about technology.
1. Software as Service and sell subscriptions, similar to the 37 Signal's Basecamp
2. Create online clubs, and charge for the club membership in different packages ( 3 month, 6 month, 12 month ) and within the clubs offer latest releases of the source code, documentation, and access to the community forum where members can meet each other and learn how to further customize your code, or read your tutorials on how to maintain use or customize your applications.
3. Get sponsors and display their logos on the hot spots on your support website
4. Your source code will be downloaded around the world, so on the software splash page or "About" page list the name of your sponsors. Be careful about using Google Ad words, because your online community might backfire. Sponsors are good, because when community members like your product, they tend to like your supporters too.
5. Make your Software as modular and vanilla as possible. Put together a a software development team and sell customization services. All companies have slightly different needs, so there is good money in offering training and customization services. Remember that customization cannot be mass produced, therefor it is often in demand.
6. Organize development and administration training sessions and bootcamps and charge for it. Train consultants, or offer consulting services about your product.
7. BUILD A COMMUNITY FOR YOUR SOFTWARE ( very important ) Members give you constant feedback on how to improve your product, test and report bugs on a public tracker, they take the word out, and help each other out on how to use and customize the application. Basically you reduce the cost of product development, marketing, and support. That means you'll hit the break-even much quicker and become profitable.
Making money from open source is still a new concept, and new models are being created ever few month, so stay alert and learn.
A business model is like yet another algorithm. It is a box that you put 100$ in and you get few hundred dollars out, and once you have that box, everybody else would be happy to put in money too. So focus on getting the algorithm right.
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Great developers often generate more income when they work for themselves where nobody would look over their shoulder and tell them how to do things. They become the CEO of their own company within few years, vs. if they work for another company, they may never get that opportunity.
Knowing that, if they don't work "for" anybody, they are often more than happy to work "with" other teams as collaborators as long as they get to have direct communication with the clients and stake holders and the opportunity to participate in all the decision making process. Great developers despise command chains and management hierarchies and instead prefer to work in flat team structures.
Remember: It is always easier for the Hackers to learn about business than Business people to learn about technology.
When the IT works with the MBA, that's ethical, but when either one works for the other, that is unethical!
1. Software as Service and sell subscriptions, similar to the 37 Signal's Basecamp
2. Create online clubs, and charge for the club membership in different packages ( 3 month, 6 month, 12 month ) and within the clubs offer latest releases of the source code, documentation, and access to the community forum where members can meet each other and learn how to further customize your code, or read your tutorials on how to maintain use or customize your applications.
3. Get sponsors and display their logos on the hot spots on your support website
4. Your source code will be downloaded around the world, so on the software splash page or "About" page list the name of your sponsors. Be careful about using Google Ad words, because your online community might backfire. Sponsors are good, because when community members like your product, they tend to like your supporters too.
5. Make your Software as modular and vanilla as possible. Put together a a software development team and sell customization services. All companies have slightly different needs, so there is good money in offering training and customization services. Remember that customization cannot be mass produced, therefor it is often in demand.
6. Organize development and administration training sessions and bootcamps and charge for it. Train consultants, or offer consulting services about your product.
7. BUILD A COMMUNITY FOR YOUR SOFTWARE ( very important ) Members give you constant feedback on how to improve your product, test and report bugs on a public tracker, they take the word out, and help each other out on how to use and customize the application. Basically you reduce the cost of product development, marketing, and support. That means you'll hit the break-even much quicker and become profitable.
Making money from open source is still a new concept, and new models are being created ever few month, so stay alert and learn.
A business model is like yet another algorithm. It is a box that you put 100$ in and you get few hundred dollars out, and once you have that box, everybody else would be happy to put in money too. So focus on getting the algorithm right.