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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

#21

Post by sillysaurus3 »

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…

There's nothing stopping most commercial products from releasing their source. It wouldn't impact sales. It wouldn't be a competitive disadvantage. The Code Combat team open sourced everything, and as far as I know they didn't suffer for it.

Management is just skittish. Nobody wants to open source because nobody else wants to open source.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#22

Post by mqsiuser »

Linus Torvalds knew that "the GPL would turn as many people away as it would attract" and exactly of that (it attracted a lot) he considers his decision for the GPL "to be the best decision he ever made" (though he disagrees with the too strong ideological believes of RMS "I want to (be able to) reprogram my printer's software"... sorry what?!). Linus used the big wave (pro & cons discussion on the GPL) for getting his Linux off the ground (which he succeeded with). And he is so incredibly smart and doing things right (showed it again with git... slamming CVS&SVN basically to death in a talk he gave).

Google, Facebook and others are open sourcing a good amount admitting, that this attracts skilled people (probably to be hired) and benefits their code (in the open)... "companies that use your code are never competitors". Though they remain the major force behind these projects, e.g. being accused to be show offs (hiphop vm) "look how great we are, but you'll never get it to work".

The default license on git hub is MIT. Sorry GPL, but forcing everyone to open source on modifications they make. NO way for me: Take it (http://www.use-the-tree.com) and make it proprietary (and better and make a business), you are so welcome. When you succeed with that, then congrats to you.

Enterprises want to pay and they go for FUD "no accountant was ever fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/HP". It's hard to break into that and they are even right with it, because when buying from a large vendor they are also buying into the huge support/manpower.

How does Ubuntu want to generate income? Selling shirts and Coffee-cups with "Ubuntu" printed on (okay advertising for Amazon in Unity) and diverging from "Linux for people/the desktop" to Ubuntu-Server/Cloud? But the fact that they sell T-Shirts and coffee cups (and others sell likewise silly things, like boxes with CDs and printed manuals), wow... that's a confession of failure (for this type of doing open source).

So "open source (almost) everything" (2011) [1], what a late(!) and great contribution to this discussion (free from ideological believes and focused on business).

Does RMS still live for free on the Harvard/MIT campus? And sorry I was in the group that was turned away back in the times.

[1] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#23

Post by jeffdavis »

rosser wrote: post #19

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?

That statement alone is enough to dismiss the entire article.

Perhaps if you include every half-hearted attempt to throw code in the open as a "failed effort", and ignore such half-hearted attempts for proprietary software (because they are hidden), then perhaps you could reach such a conclusion.

But I doubt the author even bothered to look for any data; instead he just printed it because it made sense to him at the time.

I guess that's also how he reached the conclusion that "it’s time to admit that this idea didn’t work out" despite the wild growth, unimaginable reach, ubiquitous use, and general acceptance of open source.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#24

Post by wmf »

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…

Nobody is going that route partly because the freedom-loving DFSG has declared it to be not free.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#25

Post by jahewson »

zalmoxes wrote: post #15
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.

I'd say it's an example of the opposite, the partly closed-source Puppet Enterprise is where the primary focus is now, support and training are still available but more of a sideshow. Also Puppet Labs got their initial funding almost 10 years ago now, back when investors believed in open source, as the parent comment observes. They've received around $85m to date, half of that since their pivot to Puppet Enterprise.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#26

Post by jeffdavis »

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…

Google makes a lot of money from open source.

If you take away licensing restrictions, then those business models that depend on licensing revenue are naturally going to suffer. But that's almost a mathematical truth and fairly obvious.

But there are lots of other businesses out there that make heavy use of open source software to make a lot of money selling something other than licenses. And those businesses often recognize an interest in contributing to the software upon which they depend.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#27

Post by jeffdavis »

"An entire economy where you gave a little [software] to get a lot [of software] ... it’s time to admit that this idea didn’t work out"

If this article was published in 1998, and we revisited it in 2008, we would have concluded that the author was proven wrong by a landslide.

The idea that someone still thinks this in 2014, and is confident enough in his opinion to publish it, is ridiculous.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#28

Post by jahewson »

chc wrote: post #6
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…

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.

It should be clear by now that this is a fallacy, many open source projects have attempted to sell support but there's just not that much demand. A good product does not need to offer much support, and consulting doesn't scale. iText is a good example of an open source library that has tried pretty much every open strategy and reverted to closed-source.

By definition you're not going to make money through open source selling licenses, but you're also not going to make any real money selling something else, unless you keep some aspect of it closed, like Google do with their search indexes.

The open source software which most companies publish has nothing to do with how they make money, it's usually some implementation detail of their infrastructure that represents an incremental improvement on some similar open software which came before it.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#29

Post by _stephan »

general_failure wrote: post #16
_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.

Yes, they still do dual licensing, though I suppose the additional licensing under the LGPL by Nokia changed the business a bit.

In any case, I wonder whether the original success of Qt would still be possible in today's business and open source community environment.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#30

Post by audreyr »

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…

A number of companies are successfully charging for use of their open-source software as a hosted service. For example, getsentry.com and travis-ci.org.
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