Just because you can make money with open source doesn't mean it is a good business model.
You Can Make Money with Open Source
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: You Can Make Money with Open Source
#12Also note that for any thing that relies heavily on art assets, specifically games, open source is largely irrelevant.
Re: You Can Make Money with Open Source
#13I am just surprised that in 2013 we are still having this discussion. There are several ways "to make money with OS"; Service-based models (like support), Dual-licensing models (think Qt, MySQL, etc), Community vs "Enterprise" packaging, Extensions to popular packages, Consulting, Platform ownership, etc etc etc. Why such big surprise?!?
Hacker News and the Harvard Business Review aren't really the same "we."
Re: You Can Make Money with Open Source
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Cloudera?
Cloudera is primarily a consulting company, as are most open-source companies. There have been only 3 successful open source companies ever: MySQL, Jboss, and Redhat
>There have been only 3 successful open source companies ever: MySQL, Jboss, and Redhat
See now, there's just no reason to go around saying things like that. Even if that were true (it's not), how would you know that it's true? Do you have a complete database of profitable businesses in your head? I doubt it. A significant number of open source companies are privately held, and there's really no telling how successful they are.
Anyway, right off the bat, you missed Mozilla Corporation.
Beyond that, the question of whether a company that does nothing but develop FOSS is irrelevant. The important question is whether developing FOSS can be a major part of a successful business strategy. You might start by asking Google and Apple.
Re: You Can Make Money with Open Source
#15This story is a bit misleading. If you study the successful companies using open source as a business model you will find they all raised large amounts of venture capital. That was during the window when open source as a business was a brand new idea. That window has now all but closed and it is exceedingly difficult to find examples of successful companies that bootstrapped their way to success running an open sourc…
Check out Enthought http://www.enthought.com/ They create some of the most used open source scientific computing software, and still manage to make money (also, a great place to work in, lots of really smart people) While this model might not work for everywhere, its possible, it just takes more effort though.
>Check out Enthought http://www.enthought.com/
They create some of the most used open source scientific computing software, and still manage to make money (also, a great place to work in, lots of really smart people)
Sounds like an outlier that proves his rule. How many more companies make far more money each with proprietary products in that domain? Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, SPSS, ...
Re: You Can Make Money with Open Source
#16Our main product is a desktop application built on top of the Firefox web browser. It is triple licensed GPL/LGPL/MPL. We make money by selling add-ons and a plus version, all of which is also sold under an OSS license (modified BSD). Similar to what Red Hat does, we modified the BSD to prohibit the use of our trade name (International registered wordmark) in any secondary distros of our OSS. In the end, all you have is a brand. Protecting that, protects the revenue stream.
Re: You Can Make Money with Open Source
#17Our[1] entire model is based around open source software. And I mean real open source software... developed in the open, with an open bug tracker, discussion on public mailing lists, etc.
Now, we don't have a lot of outside contributors at the moment, but we're certainly open to them and the code, bugs, etc. are already "out there". And all (or almost all) of our stuff is (or will be) Apache License V2 licensed.
Eventually we'll have a mix of both "productized" versions of existing projects (somewhat akin to the way Red Hat "productize" Linux) and projects that we started and wrote the bulk of the code for from scratch. Our goal is to very much follow the Red Hat model with subscriptions being a major part of our revenue stream, and then complemented by professional services, training and other add-ons.
In the end will we "make money with Open Source"? I don't know, but we're going to try, because A. it's what we believe in, B. it's The Right Thing To Do and C. it makes the world a better place whether we succeed or fail.
Re: You Can Make Money with Open Source
#18Indeed. That's never been in dispute. You can also make money playing violin in the subway.
The thing is, if you want to make money, there are a lot better ways to make money than playing violin in the subway. And if you want to make money with software, there are a lot better ways to do it than to give your product away and hope that some of your users will give you charity or pay you for support.
Wait until we see a case study come through about a company selling a SaaS product who decided to stop charging subscription fees and instead open source it and charge for support, showing how that was the key to how they made their fortune. Then maybe we can talk about this as an option worth recommending over simply selling your software for money.
Re: You Can Make Money with Open Source
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloudera is primarily a consulting company, as are most open-source companies. There have been only 3 successful open source companies ever: MySQL, Jboss, and Redhat
>There have been only 3 successful open source companies ever: MySQL, Jboss, and Redhat See now, there's just no reason to go around saying things like that. Even if that were true (it's not), how would you know that it's true? Do you have a complete database of profitable businesses in your head? I doubt it. A significant number of open source companies are privately held, and there's really no telling how successfu…
Isn't Mozilla Foundation a non-profit? Wikipedia says it owns a taxable entity, the Mozilla Corporation, but gets the majority of it funds from donations from Google.
I think the companies listed only develop Open Source software and sell services. Google and Apple may use and support Open Source projects, but the real money makers are proprietary.
I agree that the list is still wrong.
Re: You Can Make Money with Open Source
#20This story is a bit misleading. If you study the successful companies using open source as a business model you will find they all raised large amounts of venture capital. That was during the window when open source as a business was a brand new idea. That window has now all but closed and it is exceedingly difficult to find examples of successful companies that bootstrapped their way to success running an open sourc…
Bootstrapping to success is difficult, period. I think it would be hard to find examples of companies that bootstrapped their way to success running almost any kind of business (some SaaS apps and mobile app things, maybe).
Nonetheless, I think it's entirely possible, and we [Fogbeam Labs] are certainly working very hard on a new "Open Source company". The thing is, you're right that "open source as a business model" is no longer a new idea, and simply being open source isn't enough to guarantee a certain level of buzz and attention. So it's harder now, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. To us, being "open source" is a differentiator, but it isn't necessarily the main thing that separates us from our competition. We think it's important, we think it's The Right Thing To Do, but we still have to deliver more value than the other guys at the end of the day and we're going to have to learn to out market the other guys.