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How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

mikeperham.com

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Re: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

#81

Post by Flimm »

justin_vanw wrote: post #73
tedunangst wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does RedHat make money from open source? They hold back support.

You are missing the point completely. 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.

By "commercial license", I presume you mean a closed-source one.

Re: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

#82

Post by justin_vanw »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #69
GFischer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

> big freaking enterprises don't use Ruby that much. Of course not. Ruby is slow, dynamic, and uses a ton of magic. Ruby is inherently more suited to smaller developers, who can use it to generate code, run scripts, embed it in things, and make use of the magic to be productive (things like generating C++, Fortran, or HTML).

I think you have it backwards.

Firstly, I am not a huge fan of Ruby, but ruby isn't magic itself, just Rails, which is a piece of crap.

Secondly, 'big enterprises' tend to employ a lot of mediocre or poor developers, and as a result have gigantic code bases to do more poorly what might be done with 1/100th as much code. You say Ruby devs use 'magic' like code generation. Big Enterprises use copy and paste.

Also, in case you woke up from a coma, it's not 1997 and everyone generates HTML. What do you think 'big enterprises' do? Type the same header into 50 million pages?

Re: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

#84

Post by Mikeb85 »

justin_vanw wrote: post #82
Mikeb85 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> big freaking enterprises don't use Ruby that much. Of course not. Ruby is slow, dynamic, and uses a ton of magic. Ruby is inherently more suited to smaller developers, who can use it to generate code, run scripts, embed it in things, and make use of the magic to be productive (things like generating C++, Fortran, or HTML).

I think you have it backwards. Firstly, I am not a huge fan of Ruby, but ruby isn't magic itself, just Rails, which is a piece of crap. Secondly, 'big enterprises' tend to employ a lot of mediocre or poor developers, and as a result have gigantic code bases to do more poorly what might be done with 1/100th as much code. You say Ruby devs use 'magic' like code generation. Big Enterprises use copy and paste. Also, in c…

> Firstly, I am not a huge fan of Ruby, but ruby isn't magic itself, just Rails, which is a piece of crap.

I'll agree that Rails is crap, but Ruby most definitely isn't.

There's some interesting stuff going on in the Ruby world, mostly coming out of Japanese universities and research institutes. And Ruby certainly does have bits of magic, which is why it's so easy to write DSLs and code generators... Not saying other languages can't do it, but in Ruby everything is made pretty easy.

Re: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

#85

Post by GFischer »

marcosdumay wrote: post #79
GFischer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

Does that point stands when people can freely start using the software, and enterprises decide to buy support because they are already using the product? 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…

I think many sane ones do have a corporate credit card for small purchases.

But others don't, the one I work for has a generic process for software/development tools, which must be budgeted for one year in advance.

Re: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

#86

Post by chc »

geff82 wrote: post #24

"Making Money in Open Source" can have several meanings. Selling software is just what most people think of when reading the title. I myself can say I made about $150k in Open Source this year. But it wasn't by selling software, it was by doing freelance jobs and consulting that involved free software only. Money wasn't coming in on autopilot, I had to get up every day and go to work at several places. But for me, fr…

I can't figure out how the license on the software is relevant to this story. It seems like you could just as easily tell this story to relate how well a lucky money-making charm works. The charm did not make you money; the hours you put in consulting did. I mean, this doesn't give me any reason to open-source any software I write outside of a specific contract to do so.

Re: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

#87

Post by purephase »

mperham wrote: post #31

Author here, thanks for the kind words. Always nice to wake up to a DDoS of my site at 2AM. :-) Recurring revenue is a pricing change I'm seriously considering, I just don't have a payment system in place that can manage my customer list and handle the annual CC charge.

Just have to say, Sidekiq and Dalli are two gems that I view as essential in the Rails toolkit. Thanks for your work in those areas.

Re: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

#88

Post by chc »

quaffapint wrote: post #38

So who provides support for the base product? My concern with the free and 'enterprise' version of products, is support for the free. You could say just community support, but then if things aren't getting fixed either you end up fixing them or your product gets a bad name. If you provide email support, you're tying a lot of your time to the free product. Just curious how others handle this.

I'm sure that he'd be willing to offer support if you wanted to pay for the support.

Re: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

#89

Post by foobarian »

justin_vanw wrote: post #82
Mikeb85 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> big freaking enterprises don't use Ruby that much. Of course not. Ruby is slow, dynamic, and uses a ton of magic. Ruby is inherently more suited to smaller developers, who can use it to generate code, run scripts, embed it in things, and make use of the magic to be productive (things like generating C++, Fortran, or HTML).

I think you have it backwards. Firstly, I am not a huge fan of Ruby, but ruby isn't magic itself, just Rails, which is a piece of crap. Secondly, 'big enterprises' tend to employ a lot of mediocre or poor developers, and as a result have gigantic code bases to do more poorly what might be done with 1/100th as much code. You say Ruby devs use 'magic' like code generation. Big Enterprises use copy and paste. Also, in c…

Ruby itself may not be magic but it encourages magic frameworks which end up extremely hard to maintain under turnover. I guess part of the problem is that when you have a couple of smart developers they try to outdo each other in the cleverness of their code, so it essentially ends up being write-only software.

Re: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

#90

Post by tagawa »

jrallison wrote: post #67
informatimago wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL licenses do not prevent the owner of the copyright to release other copies under another license.

Technically, Sidekiq Pro isn't a copy. It's a set of plugins designed to integrate with the open source project.

In which case, maybe it's classified as a derivative work of the original OS project? This is how WordPress tries to classify third-party themes and plugins, meaning they should "thus inherit the GPL license". See: http://www.wordpress.org/about/license/
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