Re: [OT] mothers, free software

[Benno]

On Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 15:24:08 -0500, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 21:10 +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>>      o One cannot make money with free software
>> 
>> The FSF, the OpenBSD project and RedHat are examples of the contrary.
>
>Respectfully, this is not precise. Neither FSF nor OpenBSD are
>for-profit organizations. Even a casual read of the RedHat 10Q and 10K
>filings reveals that RedHat consistently *loses* money on software, and
>that their revenue strategy is based on generating money through support
>and upgrade agreements.
>
>In fact, RedHat did not show a profitable year until very recently, and
>it is very clear from their filings that the profit was based entirely
>on support revenue. For a long time, it wasn't clear that this was going
>to work, and the filings clearly identified this as the most important
>investor risk for potential buyers of redhat shares.
>
>The MySQL people have a similar model.
>
>So yes: you can make money in this business, but not on the free
>software per se.
>
>>From a business perspective, the risk of free software is that your
>competitor can use your code against you. The benefit of free software
>is that your competitor cannot undercut you on price, which makes you
>very very hard to dislodge from your market position unless you screw up
>pretty badly.

Sleepycat seem to be an example to the contrary. They make most
of their money frmo licensing their GPLed software. (I can find the
reference if anyone is interested.. I'd need to dig through my 
email though.)

Cheers,

Benno