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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

#411

Post by krageon »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #165

How about selling adds that are embedded into source-code? The target-audience of the adds would of course be coders because who else reads source-code. Maybe not a big audience but the adds could be permanent. And what would the donors be advertising? Maybe development tools but also themselves as a potential employer. It would be basically VERY targeted marketing because only coders would see it.

Except who wants to let that particular parasite poison another good thing? Certainly not the people most likely to actually work on OSS. I know I would stay away from any project that did this, even if I considered donating my time and energy to them.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#413

Post by z3t4 »

Everything can be sold if you can find the right buyer. When it comes to browsers Google is the customer, and users are the product. When doing free open source software, your product can not be the software itself. People don't pay for software, they pay for solutions. What problems are your software solving ? How can you package and sell that solution ? People less smart then you are packaging water and selling it in bottles. A lot have to do with branding.

When going from free to paid, consider the probability that the only reason people use your service is because it's much cheaper then the alternatives.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#414

Post by hutzlibu »

anon1m0us wrote: post #124
throwaway2048 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lock in is far more complete than it ever was in the Microsoft era, with Microsoft of the 90s, you could mostly still choose to just stop buying their crap, and stick with what you had while you migrate, or work out an alternative. The minute you stop paying a cloud vendor, your entire infrastructure vanishes in a cloud of smoke, and if you relied on their "value add" proprietary services, you are left with basic…

schadenfreude for all! Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. The world thought programmers were just a bunch of nerds to be taken advantage of. Microsoft said no. The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. The nerds got their way. They got free everything. And now the OSS worls is a convoluted mess. It cos…

"The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system."

The nerds hated microsoft because microsoft was (and still is in many ways) mandatory.

And they remained that by vendor deals, government contracts etc.

So everybody learned in schools on windows computers and with microsoft office and so on and so on.

Thats the reason, not because of money - it was allways easy to crack windows (I believe intentionally, rather a cracked Windows, contributing to the monopoly, than something else)

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#415

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #401
pjmlp wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget to get a keyboard and screen insurance on top of the premium price.

I will, for one. I thought you were OK with paying for good stuff, like Lisp compilers/IDEs or other tooling. Suddenly it's bad to charge a premium?

I am quite confortable paying for stuff, do it all the time.

What I don't do is to pay premium for the previlege to use keyboards that break down with a single dust particle and screens that get scratched with the laptop's own keyboard, that might not be replaced without the additional Apple Care package.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#416

Post by chopin »

coldtea wrote: post #395
noir_lord wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry but I disagree, Cinnamon on Fedora is as good a desktop GUI in its day as win2k was in its and imo considerably better than win10 and I started on DOS3.22 so I’ve used them all even ME. It’s fast, stable, well laid out and very easy to configure. It also plays well with both gtk and qt apps. It took a long time but Linux did catch up it’s just by the time it did desktops are less relevant to average people.

> It’s fast, stable, well laid out and very easy to configure. Only if your chance on a "good" compatible laptop. Else all bets are off. The BT/wifi might not work, the video drivers might be problematic, the laptop might not sleep when you close the lid, the fans might blare all the time, and so on. And even at that, it changes from release to release, whatever the fancy of e.g. Gnome devs strikes them for a non-com…

>Only if your chance on a "good" compatible laptop.

So there's no need of "Windows Certified"? I had a fair deal of the problems you described on Windows laptops (private and company provided, all certified for Windows, no less).

Linux desktop has its fair share of problems, but Windows runs far from flawless either. I liked Windows when it didn't spy on users but after switching to Linux I was positively surprised. And some stuff I really care for such as incremental remote backups with a decent user interface runs way better on Linux.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#417

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #400
pjmlp wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, right.

Considering it was last updated in the 1990s and only supports 256 colors and fullscreen, and conflicts in very annoying ways with post Vista+ desktop composition, I think its safe to declare it dead for anything except some old games. SDL is perfectly comparable, except vastly less of a clunky ancient pain in the ass. That is why almost every 2d indie game uses it and not DirectDraw, so to say linux has nothing comp…

[deleted]

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#418

Post by pjmlp »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #400
pjmlp wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, right.

Considering it was last updated in the 1990s and only supports 256 colors and fullscreen, and conflicts in very annoying ways with post Vista+ desktop composition, I think its safe to declare it dead for anything except some old games. SDL is perfectly comparable, except vastly less of a clunky ancient pain in the ass. That is why almost every 2d indie game uses it and not DirectDraw, so to say linux has nothing comp…

SDL is not a platform library with driver support.

Yeah, maybe I should state Direct2D as well to see what your answer would be.

So what is the Linux answer to DirectText? Surely not SDL.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#419

Post by Crinus »

emilsedgh wrote: post #402
coldtea wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not why Linux Desktop never got traction. When Linux on Desktop was born, Microsoft's platform was already an ecosystem all around the world. Hundreds of thousands of companies had developed applications for MS-DOS and were invested in Microsoft's ecosystem and users had already learnt the paradigms. Clients were already locked-in on Windows. That didn't prevent OS X, from a near bankrupt company in 1998-99…

> That didn't prevent OS X, from a near bankrupt company in 1998-99 with ~2% of PCs in the US, to get to ~10-15% in the same timespan. And that while still introducing a whole new OS in 2000, and changing CPU architecture in 2005. Oh my friend you're under-selling Apple. Apple, the most profitable company in the world, didn't get more than 10-15% of the market share. They didn't break any API's either. And they creat…

> Linux supports that too. You can still have a KDE1 app running on your Desktop.

It is not the same, under Windows 10 you can run a Win95 app as-is since the OS comes with the necessary APIs and these APIs still get updates.

Under Linux not only nobody has the KDE1 libraries installed, but also not any distribution provides them, they rely on other libraries that are incompatible, are a pain to build and unlike Win32 and similar APIs, KDE1 libraries have never seen any new improvements over the years. As an example for the latter, Win32 applications written for Windows 95 can use the extra text editor control functionality introduced after XP despite this functionality not even existing when they were made.

To provide something equivalent, the Linux desktop needs GUI API that will remain backwards compatible in the future (as nothing can be done about the past anyway) while at the same time getting improvements that apply to both new and existing programs.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#420

Post by kgwxd »

mythz wrote: post #86

Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…

Maybe all the major OSS players and FSF could get together and build a cloud company with the promise of only building on OSS and sharing the profits. I'd host anything I could at a place like that, even if I didn't really need hosting for it. It wouldn't even have to be the best in the business, just reasonably priced.
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