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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

#41

Post by _stephan »

jeffdavis wrote: post #40
_stephan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentence immediately before the one you quoted is: "Remember how the open source software movement was supposed to be like Woodstock, with everybody sharing and everything free?" I think the author wants to express that open source has changed a lot from the early days. As far as I remember it, open source originally was driven mainly by students, academics and hobbyists, and by service companies like Red Hat or…

What in the article lead you to that interpretation?

I understand the article as making the argument that in the past companies tried to make a business out of the open source project itself while nowadays the open source project is more often a byproduct or a basic infrastructure component for other commercial projects.

I don't think the examples and quotes used by the author are great, but I do think that there is some truth to this argument.

Re: Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

#42

Post by dekhn »

wolfgke wrote: post #39
jeffdavis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> Google makes a lot of money from open source. Google makes a lot of money from advertising. FTFY

... 90% of its revenue, yes, we all know this. The uppost was basically saying that its revenue is derived at least partially from the use of open source (not in the selling of services around the use of open source by its customers, as say Red Hat does). IT's a digression from the point of the original article, but in short: many very successful commercial enterprises depend heavily on open source to get their work done. It wouldn't make sense any other way- the licensing costs to assemble the equivalent of GNU/Linux and the code that runs on top of it, using only proprietary software, would be ruinous, and in many cases, there just aren't superior commercial equivalents anyway.
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