Comments on: Part 2 of Making Money with FOSS

By: Zee

Zee — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 06:57:20 +0000

Maybe the money can come in with additional services to enhance the FOSS.

By: Miles

Miles — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:54:57 +0000

Count me as one that doesn’t fully get it yet. Your posts discussing the difference between creating and distributing software were helpful, but it still seems to me that being able to charge for something essentially means having a monopoly on that thing, whether that thing is your time or some piece of property (intellectual or otherwise). When a potential customer can get what they need for free, why would they pay for it? Perhaps what you envision is a purely service economy (outside of hard goods such as toasters, in which case replication and distribution would have costs). If you have any references that would help me understand where you’re headed that would be great. I’d love for a robust economic model to grow out of FOSS, but I don’t see it yet.

A related question: If I’m a software developer who wants to work in line with FOSS principles, can I charge for anything other than my time?

By: Simon

Simon — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:12:18 +0000

There is only one but major thing wrong with your business model DoctorMo.
Your model assumes that users know what they want and while that may sometimes be true, most of the time it is not. There is a big difference between what users THINK they want, and what they ACTUALLY want. You can see that in many forms in FOSS, for example, there are users wanting option A to be added to program Z, when what they actually want is a better application behavior (and that option A is not really necessary). There is another problem with this, say a part of the userbase wants to add option B and another part don’t want it, they want option C instead. You can’t please everyone, so you’ll either have to make a part of the userbase angry or fork the project so that both parts are satisfied. Then you have a problem of distribution… This can go on indefinitely and you end up with a hundred forks to maintain.
More serious problem is creating a new application. People often don’t know what they want or need until they see it. That’s just human nature, and buying is an impulsive thing. What you suggest is not buying – it’s investment, but ordinary users don’t want to invest in new and non existent software. This is especially true for entertainment software or games if you will. Would people invest in World of Goo or Caster? I doubt it. Those are some original and cool games which I think would have never made it with the “investment” business model.
That said, I hope you prove me wrong or that there is another solution for these issues.

By: NickFox

NickFox — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:16:13 +0000

Martin, this has been very thought provoking and an interesting travel into the less commonly viewed side of FOSS, I have a follow up part 3 I invite you to read and post your thoughts upon.

http://www.rubmyubuntu.com/LinuxSoftwareBusiness/Part3

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:08:57 +0000

Thank you for writing this great series of articles! I’m truly glad to see someone outside of the FSF itself writing about these topics who really gets it, and really believes in the model. I know I’ll refer skeptics to these writings in the future.

By: Martin Owens

Martin Owens — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:17:54 +0000

This is what I’ve been doing, but every time I talk about it people like yourself just skip right over the proposal and go “But FOSS doesn’t make money does it”, it’s like I’m not putting it in words that make sense yet.

You get paid for WRITING software, not for DISTRIBUTING software. If someone wants something written, then it should be possible for them to pay for someone to do it. Sounds easy, at the moment in FOSS we discourage people from paying for development, even though it does happen.

Although most FOSS programmers for the big projects are paid employees anyway, so we’re not really talking about things like Linux, but other FOSS projects.

By: Kirrus

Kirrus — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:11:27 +0000

I think we’ll always have closed source, because we all need to eat, and supporting something small, and niche via people paying for support just won’t work.

If you really want to get rid of all closed source, then find a model that will allow developers to be paid, whilst not charging for the software. And the people who market the software. And the people who deal with the paychecks. And the website. Etc, etc,