Making Money on Open Source

After the success of yesterday's Package Discussion, I've decided to open another can of worms up today. Making Money on OpenSource is a hard thing to do. Companies can't pay their programmers without cold hard cash, and programmers can't eat without cash. Hit the link below to read a very interesting bit written by Eric W. Sink of CSFactory, Inc.. We can't all write books about software and live off that, and we certainly can't all support others and make a living. How can programmers feed their family in a world where they give away what they do for free? Hit the link below to read more good stuff.

The following is written by Slashdot Reader Eric W. Sink

Convince me.

A Slashdot poster recently mentioned that open source development is the wave of the future.

Why?

I'm going to proceed under the assumption that most software is, and will be written by people who need to be paid. I own a small software company here in central Illinois. We have 8 employees. It costs real money to pay everyone's salaries. Expecting to be paid a salary is not evil, and if you disagree with this, you probably don't want to read the remainder of this article.

Frankly, I would love to be working on open source projects. I like Linux a great deal. I've contributed thousands of lines of open source code over the years (none of which has made a huge impact). Open source development projects are fun, and they produce some of the highest quality, most widely-used software in the world.

If I could find a way for my company to be involved in the open source world, while still paying the bills, I would probably do it. However, I don't see much money in it. As far as I can tell, open source efforts will continue to be dominated by volunteers -- talented people with lots of time on their hands who contribute open source software because they really enjoy doing so.

Netscape's release of the Mozilla code is probably the most prevalent example of open source contributions by a large corporation. People are hailing this move as the beginning of a trend, but I'm not convinced that the trend has a healthy destination. Netscape released their source code because they lost the browser war. I applaud their move, because it benefits the community. However, I see their action as that of a wounded animal, backed into a corner, striking out at Microsoft with one last blow. The release of their source was a loss of a major corporate asset. It was also a gain, in the sense that it harms their largest competitor. The only reason they released it is because the market conditions changed such that harming Microsoft was more valuable to them than preserving their proprietary code base.

One such instance does not make a trend, but I believe other Microsoft roadkill will follow suit. Companies like Corel should definitely consider opening their source. What about all those Mac ISVs? I remember some great apps over the years on the Mac. Rather than letting those codebases languish in obscurity, why not lash back at Microsoft and release them to the open source community?

An open source revolution is on the horizon, and Microsoft has no one to blame but themselves.

However, I am not yet convinced that this revolution can sustain itself. For most of us, harming Microsoft does not translate into the money we need to pay the bills.

So, I'm asking the readers of this forum to convince me. I am definitely a fan of open source. However, at my company, we use, develop for, and recommend Microsoft software, because doing so brings in the revenue we need in order to pay our salaries.

If you can show the businesses of the world how to make money in open source efforts, then the open source revolution can become a self-sustaining movement, and a real force in the software industry.