Re: It's very hard to make money from free software Re: [Fsuk-manchester] RMS on Swedish Pirate Party vs Free Software

[Lucy]

2009/7/30 green h <address@hidden>:
> ... 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.
>  [snip]
> 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
[snip]
> What's a realistic alternative?

I'm not sure that looking for one single answer is the right way to
go. I think the industry is changing massively compared to even 10
years ago. However, software will always need to be written and very
often the only way that to happen is for someone to be paid to do it.
And as someone else has already pointed out most software is
bespoke/inhouse stuff anyway. Therefore, there will always be someone
willing to pay (as a programmer, I hope so at least).

I'm not convinced that the boxed software market was really that big,
outside of Microsoft and games. Don't underestimate the market for
customisation and configuration of software. Everyone's IT needs are
increasing, and most people and companies will be willing to outsource
some of it.

Maybe this increased sharing will stop us programmers reinventing
wheels all the time and mean the rate of progress is that much
quicker. It seems to me like this is happening already and so the
future is likely to be very different to how things are now. Difficult
to predict and very exciting :) I use MS technologies in my day-to-day
work now and even that is mixed with FOSS now - MS distribute jquery
with the freely licensed ASP.NET MVC framework, to which I add free
libraries, managed by a free VCS. The list goes on..

Lucy

p.s I've really enjoyed reading the responses on this topic. We have
some brilliant people on this list. Thanks everyone!