Re: [Pan-users] Re: OT: freedomware vs... Was: Building Pan on Windows?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:21:32 pm Alan Meyer wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano <address@hidden>
>
> > On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:25:06 am Leslie Newell wrote:
> > ...
> >
> > > My challenge to you is to come up with a business model where
> > > I can both eat and make my code open source.
> >
> > It works for Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum, Richard Stallman,
> > and hundreds of others.
>
> I think you're setting the bar too high here Steven.  The people
> you named are the rock stars of open source.  Asking us ordinary
> mortals to do as they do is like asking of a guitarist, "Why can't
> you just make a living the way Eric Clapton does?  It works for
> him!" I don't know if "hundreds" of others make a living from open
> source.

Red Hat has approximately 1000 employees, and they are just one out of 
many companies whose business model involves open source software.

Leslie asked for a business model where he can make a living while still 
releasing code as open source. Red Hat do it. Canonical does it. Sun 
does it, although who knows what will happen now that they've been 
bought out by Oracle. Even ID Software does it (although they release 
their games as closed source first, and then a year or three later 
re-release under an open source library).

(Technically even Microsoft do it, although it is such a vanishingly 
small part of their business that most people don't even realise that 
they do, in fact, release open source software.)

Richard Stallman's business model is, you pay him as a consultant. Linus 
Torvalds' and Guido van Rossum's model is to have an employer who 
values their open source software so much that they are willing to pay 
them to continue developing it. I could continue, but I trust I've made 
my point.

You don't need to be a software rock star to get paid to work on open 
source software. Open Source is a strategic weapon in the hands of many 
companies, and they are more than happy to pay people to develop OSS 
they can use particularly if it hurts their non-OSS competitors. Google 
has thousands of employees, the majority of whom get to work on OSS 
projects, but only a few are "rock stars". Google is, of course, 
exceptional, but only in the sense that they are an early adaptor of 
the "OSS as a strategic weapon" meme.

One model is, "give the software away, sell the consulting services". 
Another is "give the anti-virus software away, sell subscriptions to 
the virus updates". A third could be, "give the game engine away, sell 
the game data files". Or "give away the standard version, sell the 
advanced version".

And another could be, "don't give the software away at all, but still 
release it as open source". Open source means free as in liberty, not 
necessarily free as in beer: just because you make the source code 
available doesn't mean you can't sell the program, and just because you 
keep the source code secret doesn't mean people can't copy it or 
reverse engineer it.

I'm happy for Leslie that he can make a living from selling software. 
That puts him in a crowd of about 0.01% of independent software 
developers. I have no idea what business models will work for him and 
his niche crowd, but he shouldn't *assume* that open sourcing the 
software *necessarily* means he can't make a living from it.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano