Making money with open source

If open source is the future of technology, where will the money come from?

If open source is the future of technology, where will the money come from?

In this article Services and Support Business Model the author analyses what works in favor and against open source based businesses that rely on the services and support business model.

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0 thoughts on “Making money with open source

  • February 12, 2005 at 12:52 am
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    The problem with trying to come up with an Open Source Economics scheme is that OpenSource concepts originally fly in the face of commercialism. Leaving aside the right to know exactly what you are running on your hardware i’ll just concentrate on the socio-economic aspect in my 2 cent’s.

    The underlying idea in open source software is that we will have a mutually owned [basic] software, that any one could study and modify (and hopefully improve) and that the mutual ownership of the software would be the cost sharing of maintenance. This is okay while all the animals on the farm are working with equal zeal.

    Of course things do not remain so equal when there are a lot more users and not enough developers. The users STILL demand a particular functionality or want a specific driver or need a new ease-of-use operatability but they are not paying in the unspoken currency of contribution to the code.

    Today, 99% of the open source users couldn’t program a ‘Hello World’ application if their lives depended on it.

    This is not to say that every one who wants to use emacs should learn Lisp – but when there is a lack of proper developer-to-user ratio in opensource the dividend (of software improvements) for the open source developers isn’t there any more.

    IMHO, open source, is a good breeding ground for software development. However, when it reaches a large threshold of users where the developer to user ratio falls below a particular watermark (say 1 to 1000) the compensations to developers really should become more classic (like money) because by that time most users don’t understand the barter-economy of open source.

    Submitted Respectfully,
    Ahmed Masud

  • January 26, 2005 at 1:39 am
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    [QUOTE]If open source is the future of technology [/QUOTE]
    That’s quite a bold proclamation. People who live in islands can get deluded into forgetting the rest of the universe outside. Open source is hardly the future of technology. The Golden Gate Bridge, the space shuttle, organic LEDs (I can go on all day) are examples of technology. What, pray, are their open source equivalents?

  • January 25, 2005 at 11:42 pm
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    Hello everyone ,

    Opensource is a concept , where every member contibutes his/her expertise in building up a genuine product , the ultimate aim remains to contribute to the society as Richard Trovald claims .

    When making money is concerend with open source, it does provide a platform to stand upon, you never have to start from scratch, Putting in your tech knowledge , building concepts with opensource projects will definitely generate revenues in Servies and implementations.

    Though this is very abstract from the ground level , one needs to have defined business model when thiniking of using the OSS project as business source of revenue.

    Because you need to lead the market when you launch with the OSS project.

    Besides what LINUX has doen is exceptional , Governments and corporations have turned to LINUX ,but they haven’t really mentioned which LINUX will the be using . Is is redHat , fedora, skole ect ect .

    Regards

    Nihar A Kalghatgi

    [email protected]

  • January 25, 2005 at 11:37 pm
    Permalink

    Hello everyone ,

    Opensource is a concept , where every member contibutes his/her expertise in building up a genuine product , the ultimate aim remains to contribute to the society as Richard Trovald claims .

    When making money is concerend with open source, it does provide a platform to stand upon, you never have to start from scratch, Putting in your tech knowledge , building concepts with opensource projects will definitely generate revenues in Servies and implementations.

    Though this is very abstract from the ground level , one needs to have defined business model when thiniking of using the OSS project as business source of revenue.

    Because you need to lead the market when you launch with the OSS project.

    Besides what LINUX has doen is exceptional , Governments and corporations have turned to LINUX ,but they haven’t really mentioned which LINUX will the be using . Is is redHat , fedora, skole ect ect .

    Regards

    Nihar A Kalghatgi

    [email protected]

  • January 25, 2005 at 9:43 pm
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    It’s definitely not easy to convince people to pay for open source support and services, however that’s only because there is still a large amount of people/organizations who really don’t understand (the benefits of) open source software. Since 2000 we at openflows.org have been successfully providing commercial services and support to organizations who want to use (free and) open source technology. For the most part we have had to be the people to convince them to use open source in the first place, though once we have done so the organization in question has almost always embraced open source as they would a new child. That has been the real issue for us: getting people to understand the truth about free and open source software, and cutting through all the FUD that is out there. Once this is done, their general willingness, even eagerness to pay for services and support is heartening and speaks to the long term sustainability of open source in general.

  • January 25, 2005 at 9:26 pm
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    I think money is to be made from projects and products built on top of OSS, not from an OSS product itself.

    1. You would normally spend tens of thousands of dollars on commercial products. You have your customer money so there’s more for them to spend.

    2. You can extend an OSS project
    You’d have to be careful of licenses. If the produect had a good OO design you might be able to avoid that, however.

  • January 25, 2005 at 8:41 pm
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    I wonder how many actually pay for support and services to open source products. Does anybody know any stats on this?

    Tweaking open source products and struggling and suffering your way to a successful installtion is so much part of routine that most companies would build expertise inhouse and won’t buy these services. So where the money in open source comes from is very much a question mark.

    In the dotcom boom, nobody knew where the money was coming from but we just presumed that it was coming from somewhere. Even with service and support based open source companies, I think we are just presuming that money will come in that way.

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