Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
#2> The open source method may be effective if enough people play along, but it does not make money in itself. Moreover, by definition it implies that open source projects have many more mistakes, bad code and failed efforts on their way to succeeding, compared with conventional projects.
Which definition of open source (method?) do they go by?
Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
#3Lucky for us the free market isn't Darwinian.
Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
#4 > A regular company couldn’t have experimented with creating 10 versions of an online photo album, then picked the best one.
Yes, but often 10 companies try to make an online photo album and the market picks one (or a few). The comparison between open source projects and the dynamics inside a company doesn't seem like the right one.
Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
#5Its extremely difficult to make money with open source. With the notable exception of Red Hat there aren't a lot of open source companies that are known to be consistently profitable.
Most of the bigger companies raised money when VC's believed in the open source business model and are still operating on those funds. That's an avenue that is no longer open to today's open source entrepreneurs.
One possible exception might be the WordPress model of offering hosting.
Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
#6Its extremely difficult to make money with open source. With the notable exception of Red Hat there aren't a lot of open source companies that are known to be consistently profitable. Most of the bigger companies raised money when VC's believed in the open source business model and are still operating on those funds. That's an avenue that is no longer open to today's open source entrepreneurs. One possible exception…
The way you make money with open-source is by not trying to sell the open-source product. Apple releases lots of stuff as open-source, but it's not a problem because they don't want to sell you Clang. Similarly, Red Hat aims to sell big corporate contracts, not licenses to their open-source software.
Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
#7Its extremely difficult to make money with open source. With the notable exception of Red Hat there aren't a lot of open source companies that are known to be consistently profitable. Most of the bigger companies raised money when VC's believed in the open source business model and are still operating on those funds. That's an avenue that is no longer open to today's open source entrepreneurs. One possible exception…
The way you make money with open-source is by not trying to sell the open-source product. Apple releases lots of stuff as open-source, but it's not a problem because they don't want to sell you Clang. Similarly, Red Hat aims to sell big corporate contracts, not licenses to their open-source software.
> The way you make money with open-source is by not trying to sell the open-source product. Apple releases lots of stuff as open-source, but it's not a problem because they don't want to sell you Clang.
In other words, the way you make money with open source is by not making money with open source. The downside of this is that you don't make money with open source.
Unless you count using open source (as it contributes to the development and monetization of the non-open-source software you make money with). But then you could say everyone is using open source to make money, which I think misses the point the article is trying to make.
Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
#8Its extremely difficult to make money with open source. With the notable exception of Red Hat there aren't a lot of open source companies that are known to be consistently profitable. Most of the bigger companies raised money when VC's believed in the open source business model and are still operating on those funds. That's an avenue that is no longer open to today's open source entrepreneurs. One possible exception…
The way you make money with open-source is by not trying to sell the open-source product. Apple releases lots of stuff as open-source, but it's not a problem because they don't want to sell you Clang. Similarly, Red Hat aims to sell big corporate contracts, not licenses to their open-source software.
Right, you make money off open source software by monetizing its complements. Intel pays for Linux kernel developers because having a quality Linux kernel means that companies are more likely to buy some commodity x86 box than they are to buy a commercial Unix running on SPARC or POWER. Red Hat spends money on all kinds of Linux development because they can monetize their support effort. This works well for some kinds of software that have complements that lend themselves well to monetization by the same people who are funding development. Other kinds of projects aren't as lucky.
Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
#9I don't think open source is really about making money for most companies, it's more about improving quality and keeping costs down. At a former employer we did follow the give-it-away-and-charge-for-a-service model, but we also worked on several of the open source libraries and frameworks we built our products on.
We shared all of this work with the upstream projects, as we had no interest whatsoever in maintaining private forks and because better quality infrastructure attracts more users, which again leads to further improvements or at least ensures the project stays maintained.
Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money
#10The economic system in the US in based on very, very strong property rights. This greatly skews the advantage from the ones doing the work to the ones who own the result of this work.
If US property rights were not so strong there would not be such enormous advantages given to those who produce proprietary software. This isn't as much an issue with open source business models as much as it is with US economic policy.