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Re: Money in Open Source

Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 5:53 am
by alex.barylski
There are many ways to make money in OSS, sure...the question or fact that most PHP developers seem to forget, is that there are few PHP applications which are commercial successes.

SugarCRM, WordPress (Automattic), Drupal (Acquia)...and a handful of others. Handful being the operative word. :P

There are countless others that have some commercial success. I'm Chris has had some success in supporting Swift Mailer and most authors of most CMS's probably get a contract or two.

What you need to ask is what exactly are you after?

1. Long term sustainable, full time, self employment? Odds are stacked against us.
2. Short term, subsidary income, couple hundred bucks every month or so? Much more likely.

The fact of the matter is, "open source" is equated to "free" by 99% of it's users...free as in air...not as in speech...why would anyone pay for anything they can get for free? They either need to:

a. Not be aware the product is freely available -- shady business
b. Be enticed with value added services, support, etc

If you do open source incorrectly, not only do you give it away for free, but others WILL profit from you hard work and likely NOT give back a single penny. I swear OSS licenses were written up by conniving lawyers and business men who knew/reaized developers would be dumb enough to invest thousands of hours of hard work into a single project, dump it as open source hoping to make profit, never making a single penny (with the exception being the odd donation) and said developer turns jaded.

I have certainly read far more stories about <span style='color:blue' title='I'm naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span> off developers (myself included) who have tried, failed, tried again, failed, etc than I have of the Matt Mullenweg's of the world (ie: WordPress founder).

My biggest grief with open source licenses, is none of them are really intended for full scale applications. They seem to protect only the source code, not the interface or data they generate. I personally think it's critical that a well designed, thoughout, planned and implemented application deserves the same rights as the source code. It takes me at least as long to plan, design, re-design an effective simple interface, so I expect that to be recognized and copyright's to stay intact.

Sorry, end of rant...just turning over in my grave here thinking about releasing a product as open source...experience tells me DON'T and reality tells me, what choice do I have and what do you have to lose???

Cheers,
Alex

Re: Money in Open Source

Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 7:07 am
by VladSun
PCSpectra wrote:I swear OSS licenses were written up by conniving lawyers and business men who knew/reaized developers would be dumb enough to invest thousands of hours of hard work into a single project, dump it as open source hoping to make profit, never making a single penny (with the exception being the odd donation) and said developer turns jaded.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Re: Money in Open Source

Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 10:39 am
by volomike
One thing to keep in mind...it seems at least to me that when you create proprietary software, you have to arm up against the software patent trolls. But make it GPL, and they can't sue you for something you don't actually sell. You would think, at least. And recently, that seems to have held up in court. Also recently, it seems software patents got a major blow in the courts (thank goodness!) and now if it's not tied to hardware of some sort, it's not a patent in the USA. (But the patent lawyers are hard at work defending their living and they may reinstate the policy again.)

I hate patent trolls. If I were a dictator, they'd be the first in line to be deported.

Re: Money in Open Source

Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 11:00 am
by josh
hah. i read about one company on digg that patented "an icon that launches an action" essentially shortcuts, they were actively going against MS. it was implicit that if it worked they'd start suing every other modern software company in order of lucrativeness :evil:

Re: Money in Open Source

Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 11:43 am
by Jenk
RedHat, Suse (Novell), osCommerce... there are loads of O/S developed apps that are making money.

OpenSource does not equate to free; if a product is licensed with a proprietary license, businesses cannot use it without paying for it (or face being stomped by the tax man/auditor.)

All open source means is the source code is freely available, usage of the code and the program it compiles into may not be free.

Re: Money in Open Source

Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 12:02 pm
by josh
Eh if people dont use it theres no benefit from a marketing standpoint to me
This article was interesting http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10025 ... =mncol;txt
The 'right to read' thing was creative but IMO speculative a tad

Re: Money in Open Source

Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 12:59 pm
by VladSun
jshpro2 wrote:The 'right to read' thing was creative but IMO speculative a tad
Did you read the "Author's Note" section?

Re: Money in Open Source

Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 4:32 pm
by alex.barylski
RedHat, Suse (Novell), osCommerce... there are loads of O/S developed apps that are making money
What I find interesting is how OSS advocates always mention the OS'es and major tools...what about the single developer products? There are countless in commercial software, but I know of none(or few) in open source. Show me a dozen open source PHP applications which are run by a single developer (or a small team < 5) that are commercially successful and let the developer become financially independent.

Seems to me, at the PHP level it's either you get wildly successful (WordPress) or your backed by serious VC (WordPress, SugarCRM).
OpenSource does not equate to free; if a product is licensed with a proprietary license, businesses cannot use it without paying for it (or face being stomped by the tax man/auditor.)
Maybe technically but reality is most people equate open source to FREE, as in air, not as in speech.

Not bashing open source, I think the ideals are awesome, but realistically, the odds are against you.

What I want/need to find (or hire a lawyer to write one up) is a open source license which prohibts removal of *any* copyright notice whether it be in the code or HTML or removal of logo, rebranding, etc. Also prevent free redistribution or at least project forking. I guess distribution would be nessecary inorder to allow people to upload the software to any server for commercial use.

Cheers,
Alex

Re: Money in Open Source

Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2009 5:27 am
by josh
I believe that's the BSD style license. I read the authors note, still speculative though.