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From: | green h |
Subject: | It's very hard to make money from free software Re: [Fsuk-manchester] RMS on Swedish Pirate Party vs Free Software |
Date: | Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:02:19 +0100 |
... this is interesting. This last branch of posts has
focused on one small, but important, part of software freedoms.
I went to a talk about free software last year and this point
came up over an over again.: "How do I earn money from free software?". As far
as I could tell no satisfactory answer was ever given.
Red Hat seems to make its money from support, implementation
and admin too.
It's becoming clear to me that the question might
be too broad (as in "What's the meaning of life?" - great question but it
means a different thing to just about every individual, so can't be answered
satisfactorily), so asking a more specific question might be
helpful.
One such question might be "How do I run a commercial business
that creates free software products?". If the answer is "... by
selling services to support and modify them", that's fine for some who are
providing services for existing products but not for others who want to
create new products as the effort (and investment) put into creating them
in the first place needs to be balanced by income, within a sensible
timescale.
For example, if the investment is many people years before a
viable product is available to be implemented and, hence, used as a
vehicle to sell services, the services income must be able to recoup this
(historical) investment as well as cover (current) R&D, admin etc and still
leave enough to pay a good rate to the technical people (development and
customer facing service delivery) who are doing the work that brings the money
in. However, service rates are pegged to a market expectation of a fairly
low hourly/daily rate so it's not a great financial model on which to base a
business. The traditional way to get around this has been to sell the software
to increase earnings.
What's a realistic alternative?
Cheers, Des
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