71–80 of 96 posts
I'm a big fan of Sidekiq, and the model he's chosen. Some of the features implemented in the free version (retries with logarithmic logic as to timing, scheduled tasks) could possibly in a paid version, and the price point for the Pro version ($500) is a bit bold.
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There's nothing at all wrong with what he did - it's just not 'making money from open source' per se. I guess you can argue he would not have made money were it not for the open source project, but the actual money is coming from what he's holding back.
How does RedHat make money from open source? They hold back support.
He tried selling support and failed miserably, he made no money. So, he issued a better version of the same software under a commercial license, and that sold well.
RedHat does not do that. Everything they do is available in CentOS, or is available freely. They make money selling support.
It's pretty obviously not a valid analogy.
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The GPL licenses do not prevent the owner of the copyright to release other copies under another license.
Is such a thing possible?
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You don't seem to do any custom development / extensions, which according to our experience¹ implementing OpenERP solutions, it's pretty much mandatory for any large company or governmental agency. ¹ http://www.thinkopensolutions.com/SoluçõesOpenERP/CasosdeSuc... (Portuguese)
We initially burnt hands doing custom development so stay away these days. 90% of our revenue comes from cloud hosting, which is opposite of OpenERP (which gets 90% of revenue via Partners). If we do custom development, product will suffer, so we are staying out. But we are happy to consider it if it really makes sense. Will be happy to hear your views though (will send you a separate mail on this).
We avoid technical implementation services, as most organisations we work with have a really low internal technical knowledge. If we then take the responsibility for implementing the technical side, we find that they don't take the ownership of the bigger issues. These are things like learning to publish open data and the changes in culture which this implies in the organisation. Then their failure to embrace the change needed in the organisation is projected as our failure to implement the technical side.
We have technical account management, but require for our partners who implement our tools to either have in-house the required technical skills or hire in the required skills. If they don't do this we don't do the projects, as they are very likely to fail.
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We took a different approach with http://akvo.org I noticed the really poor use of Internet systems in international development aid. More than $120 Bn is spent yearly on this, and nobody really has a clue where the money goes. There is no useful overview. So we started building tools to fix that and supply them as a paid for service. Everything we build is open source software. We have 45+ people working on this, wi…
Wow. This is pretty inspiring. We at https://erpnext.com have been looking to help govt agencies implement our Open Source ERP, but lack a forum where we can connect with such needs. Can you suggest us a way forward. I think our product can serve a great need for government organizations.
- We brought together domain experts as equals, i.e. people working in international development, water and sanitation issues (our starting market), network organisations, computer software and services, computer software marketing and communications, to solve a problem.
- We say our team is a three legged stool. Partner team (more about that below), software team and communications team. If we don't treat all three equally the stool falls over. We go so far that we think it is imperative to not have an organisation run by the tech or the international development side, but by both sides. So we have until know had two directors of the organisation, one from each domain. Working very closely with the comms director.
- Maybe most importantly though, we have a very experienced partner team. They have worked in this market for decades. They know "everyone". We literally have connections to thousands of organisations through our networks and we understand how to talk to those organisations. Our partner team know where all the gremlins are and how the processes work. They know how to get the required startup and expansion investments as well as how to get the big organisations to use our tools.
About the partner team. We don't consider us having any customers. We treat all of the organisations that work with us as partners. They then treat us as partners too and it completely changes the relationship when you are trying to solve a problem. Of course it helps that we are a non-profit foundation. (We are also not-for-loss. We have a functional business model. This is critical.)
In a traditional company our partner team would consist of strategic sales people, account managers, project managers, consultants, trainers etc. We have a partner team that fulfils all those roles, but they are a _partner_ team. Sales are not done on a quota, no bonuses are paid (which often drive really crappy sales in a s/w company) etc.
We have no marketing and PR team. We have a communications team. Most of our staff communicate. Everyone is in fact encouraged and empowered to speak for the organisation. The communications team just supports everyone learning how to communicate well. We hardly do any PR. We may need to increase it, but it mostly does itself based on our peoples open communication.
I could write a lot more, but we are creating the Akvo Handbook, which will outline all of this, and be available under an open content license. You can read it all there then. But don't hesitate to ask any specific questions you may have.
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Why do you object to calling this 'making money with Open Source'? I agree that "making money by developing and selling closed source extensions to open source products" is 'making money with Open Source'. Especially considering he also developed and maintains the OS product.
Because it seems similar to claiming prostitutes make money by greeting people and chatting. Although they do greet and chat for free, what they actually do for money is different. Note: I believe prostitution is a morally acceptable profession for consenting adults. Therefore I'm not choosing that analogy to be pejorative to the OP; I'm choosing it to be blunt. IMHO the OP is doing nothing wrong, and more power to h…
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Unfortunately, support models only work for a limited set of software. It happens to work for Red Hat. For a while, we tried making money off support contracts for Phusion Passenger. The amount of money we made with that put us far below minimum wage. It turns out that with Phusion Passenger, nobody needs good support. Some people may have trouble setting it up (mostly people who are not familiar with Unix, and don't…
For almost 20 years I've had this problem with "give away open source, sell the support," because I thought if it works well people don't need support. I've learned a lot in those 20 years that made me realize that it's not that simple, but stories like yours make me keep coming back to it. On the other hand, how hard have you tried to market support contracts?
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And since the bureaucratic overhead is so high, you better ask for enough money to make it worthwhile.
Remember the often quoted advice from Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie... Enterprise sales cycle is EXPENSIVE, so, while the actual cost of your service may be much less, you have to pay for the ten airplane flights and meetings and hotel rooms before you close your sale (and add a few one afterwards for good measure). also http://cdixon.org/2010/02/06/selling-to-enterprises/…
Somehow all that process must work for buying paper clips and pencils. Yeah, they buy those in huge amounts, but I can not conceive that they pay much of a premium. I know that governments have streamlined process for those situations. Don't corportations also have shorter procedures?
The title of this article is the opposite of what the article says. He made almost no money with open source. He made tons of money by withholding features from the open source library and instead only offering them under a commercial license as an add-on. Since this is itself a violation of the LGPL, anyone using the Pro version isn't even using open source at all, as both the original and Pro enhancements are at th…
Violation of the LGPL? By the author?
For example, if the regular version were issued with the Pro version merged into it, the author would have to provide an unmodified version in the same distribution lest he violate the LGPL. There isn't much consequence to this, unless he felt the need to sue himself.
However, since the author here also owns the rights to both the regular and Pro versions, he can just license both to the user under a commercial license when including the Pro version, which is what he does. At that point, neither is 'free as in speech' from the perspective of the person who bought the license, even though lots of the bits are the same. The user is using a non-free commercial license. The user could also use the free version under the LGPL, but that would be redundant, since they have the same code under a license they can use from buying the commercial license.
In this case the author says he relicenses both for users who can't use LGPL code.