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Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#11

Post by knocte »

fred_durst wrote: post #10

The 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.

>If US property rights were not so strong there would not be >such enormous advantages given to those who produce >proprietary software.

Why? Can you elaborate on that?

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#13

Post by pessimizer »

clarry wrote: post #7
chc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contribute…

>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.

Which is that you can't make money by selling open source software? That's pretty obvious. I think the point of the article is to discuss possible ways (or whether it is ultimately impossible) to make money for a company that produces open source software, which is not something everyone can claim to be doing.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#14

Post by lumberjack »

What about the software maintainers that are often salaried employees?

And what about the main users of the software that are saving money by using free software?

But of course your whole competitive edge is that you are giving away those rights to keep the software proprietary and to dictate who can use it, for what and for how much. You cannot simply expect to put a price tag on it and sell it, "as is".

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#15

Post by zalmoxes »

rmason wrote: post #5

Its 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…

I'm not sure how profitable they are, but puppetlabs is a very fast growing company that offers an open source product. The 'pay for support' model works well with certain open source products.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#16

Post by general_failure »

_stephan wrote: post #12

Dual licensing, like Trolltech did originally with QT, could also be a viable commercial strategy for certain open source projects, but that seems to be going out of fashion lately.

Qt and not QT.

Digia still does dual licensing of Qt and doing OK.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#17

Post by rwl »

vasquez wrote: post #9

I 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…

> it's more about improving quality and keeping costs down.

Yes. This point seems to be lost on the author of the article. Even the founders of the Open Source movement thought that.

I can't find it now, but I remember once reading an essay by Bruce Perens where he pointed out that the vast majority of software that's written lives on the cost side, not the revenue side, of a company's balance sheet, because the vast majority of software that's written is custom in-house software. If you can share those costs with others who have similar needs, everyone benefits.

As a kid who had only ever thought of software as "something you have to pay for when you want a copy for your computer", this was eye-opening for me. The idea that the software I was familiar with was the exception, rather than the rule, made it plausible that there were other ways to get high-quality software through besides paying a license fee to Microsoft. As a result, I found that idea very attractive.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#18

Post by taylodl »

It's a shame our options have been reduced to a false dichotomy of pay-for software where you have no access to the source, and pay-nothing-for software where all you have is the source. There was supposed to be another option for pay-for software where you have access to the source and may make changes to that source to suite your needs: "free" was supposed to refer to "freedom" and not "cost." But no one seems to have gone that route. Is it just not viable?

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#19

Post by rosser »

FTFA: "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."

Wait, what? How, exactly, does OSS "by definition" have more mistakes?

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#20

Post by cpayne624 »

taylodl wrote: post #18

It's a shame our options have been reduced to a false dichotomy of pay-for software where you have no access to the source, and pay-nothing-for software where all you have is the source. There was supposed to be another option for pay-for software where you have access to the source and may make changes to that source to suite your needs: "free" was supposed to refer to "freedom" and not "cost." But no one seems to h…

Can you run a software business on the honor system, where you trust that folks will pay for your open source product? Is anyone pulling that off?
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