On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 16:46, Bill McKenzie wrote:
> Myself - I would be very glad to consider Open Source as soon as someone
> answers this question from the perspective of a small company:
>
> How does a (very small) software development house make money under
Open
> Source licenses?"I have seen Thomas ask this question numerous times on numerous forums, and
have yet to see an intelligent/plausible answer. I would love to hear the
answer to his question as well. Service revenue don’t cut it either.
First off, I’m an advocate of open source in lots of contexts.
It’s possible that you just can’t make money doing this. I can’t think
of any companies that have (but i’d be interested in seeing examples).
There are numerous counter-examples - Ximian, Codeweavers, Sourceforge,
etc. - who are in the open-source business but are forced to charge (and
close) something to pay the rent.
The big open source supporters - IBM, RedHat, etc - really do make moeny
off of service (and hardware). Hardware companies want free software to
make their hardware less expensive (MS gets (list) $200 of each $600
Dell), and service companies want the software to be free so more people
will use it and need service.
As Matt pointed out, the model that Thomas uses is (it would seem)
viable, but you can’t gpl code and expect people to pay (much) for it.
As someone else pointed out, there would still be [lots of] professional
programmers in Richard Stallman’s world, but there wouldn’t be any
for-profit software development houses.
BTW, Thomas, I sympathize - we’re a small development house and I’d love
to find a viable business model that includes free software, but I just
don’t think it can happen.
-sd