Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
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Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#2> Maybe this is why you can’t make money with open source: it’s a distraction. The question isn’t open-source-vs-proprietary, but open-source-vs-business-focused.
> Another lens might be: who are you selling to? Classical scratch-your-own-itch open source software is built by programmers for programmers.
Yes, open source works well for software written for programmers as an audience. If programmers aren't using the open source software, then there usually needs to be a business that's supporting the development of it.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#3> Maybe this is why you can’t make money with open source: it’s a distraction. The question isn’t open-source-vs-proprietary, but open-source-vs-business-focused. > Another lens might be: who are you selling to? Classical scratch-your-own-itch open source software is built by programmers for programmers. Yes, open source works well for software written for programmers as an audience. If programmers aren't using the o…
This will become less true as a greater fraction of humanity learns to program.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#4This is a very clear articulation of the common problems here.
Intellectual property can only make money by preventing its use, otherwise it just spreads everywhere to everyone for free. Given this property of the Internet, and the decision of open source/Free Software to embrace rather than fight this property, what side-channels can be constructed to return some value to the developers?
> Anything paired with a physical device. People will judge the value based on the hardware and software experience together.
Not just embedded, but also SaaS. The fact that the physical device is off in a datacenter somewhere isn't so relevant. (Another implication of this is that open hardware will never behave quite like open software!)
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#5> The question isn’t open-source-vs-proprietary, but open-source-vs-business-focused.
I disagree. Some of the very successful FOSS projects are backed by businesses that benefitting using those. Linux, RocksDB, React, Tensorflow would be good examples.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#6> Maybe this is why you can’t make money with open source: it’s a distraction. The question isn’t open-source-vs-proprietary, but open-source-vs-business-focused. > Another lens might be: who are you selling to? Classical scratch-your-own-itch open source software is built by programmers for programmers. Yes, open source works well for software written for programmers as an audience. If programmers aren't using the o…
This will become less true as a greater fraction of humanity learns to program.
It sounds like you’re saying it’ll remain just as true; it just will become less meaningful of a distinction.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#7> Maybe this is why you can’t make money with open source: it’s a distraction. The question isn’t open-source-vs-proprietary, but open-source-vs-business-focused. > Another lens might be: who are you selling to? Classical scratch-your-own-itch open source software is built by programmers for programmers. Yes, open source works well for software written for programmers as an audience. If programmers aren't using the o…
This will become less true as a greater fraction of humanity learns to program.
If you take "humanity" to mean "computer users" you'll find that the trend so far has been the exact opposite of what you suggest.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#8This is a very clear articulation of the common problems here. Intellectual property can only make money by preventing its use, otherwise it just spreads everywhere to everyone for free. Given this property of the Internet, and the decision of open source/Free Software to embrace rather than fight this property, what side-channels can be constructed to return some value to the developers? > Anything paired with a phy…
This is precisely the thing, some things are valuable precisely because they are free and ubiquitous.
It's a form of value that can't be measured directly in $. If you can measure it in $ at all, you can only do it indirectly, in the form of charges for services and ancillary products.
There are no guarantees that's always feasible though. There's a threshold beyond which the cost of harvesting the value is higher than the value itself.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#9Years ago open source was about companies collaborating on commoditizing an obvious solution AWAY from the market. The economic case for open source isn’t about value added product companies, but a kind of commercial pooling of resources to create cost reduction and easier software maintenance on stuff nobody wants to buy or maintain...
Of course orgs have lost site of this. The sad reality is 99.999% of orgs are OSS freeloaders or way too conservative and hence want to in house everything. Or happy with modestly priced cloud hosted everything that ends up taking away some of OSSs maintenance savings upside.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#10> Maybe this is why you can’t make money with open source: it’s a distraction. The question isn’t open-source-vs-proprietary, but open-source-vs-business-focused. > Another lens might be: who are you selling to? Classical scratch-your-own-itch open source software is built by programmers for programmers. Yes, open source works well for software written for programmers as an audience. If programmers aren't using the o…
This will become less true as a greater fraction of humanity learns to program.
You mean when it goes from .001% of the population to .002% of the population? I don't think there will be any time that a large fraction of the world's population knows how to program. I've even tried to get my own kids interested in learning how to program to no avail. Some of my kids don't have the aptitude for it, but those who do have the aptitude just aren't interested.