Mat Churchill wrote:
I can see several business ideas related to this along the lines of something that could be fun to develop but which also has a variety of commercial possibilities.
Does anyone have any examples of how commercial collaborations with open
source projects actually work in practical terms ?
I see it kind of like a marriage, every relationship is a bit different and you have to work hard to find a happy balance and keep it there. There are certain things people have found to be helpful and work well, but in the end it's up to the happy couple to find each other, figure out how to do life together, and continue to work hard to stay ahead of issues that come up, or resurface, etc.
I think it's a similar challenge to figure out how to marry an open source project with some sort of commercial venture. But I think if you look around, there are a ton of examples ... from companies effectively using open source software in their day to day lives (Linux, X11, apache, emacs, gcc, python, etc.) to companies collaborating with open source projects for some mutual benefit to companies who derive their life blood from open source.
For instance if you were developing a hardware product specifically for
use with Flightgear, how would you develop the software side without
competitors being able to find out exactly what you are up to?
Yes, unfortunately there are a lot of sleazy bastards out there who are all to happy to rip off your work as soon as they see you making a sale or two. We can try to pretend to live in a happy world where these people don't exist, but it can be hard for a business to survive this sort of thing. Unfortunately, hardware and software vendors aren't just paranoid black helicopter types ...
I'm not much of an expert in this area, but you can use things like closed source drivers to hide your hardware specifics. But, that won't stop people from disassembling your compiled objects, downloading your microcode, etc. etc.
The best thing you can do to combat this is never develop an interesting or useful product, because if you do, you will have someone trying to copy it before long.
As an example, I'd love to see open source drivers for nvidia cards, but I certainly can't fault them for their approach. I'm no big fan of Microsoft, but I can understand why they are like they are and why they do what they do. When you are at the top of the heap you have to fight off challengers from all areas ... open source is only one of *many* challenges. But in the end, let the best company or best approach win. :-) Hopefully we can trust gov't and law enforcement to keep the playing field from getting too unlevel ... it will never be perfectly level ... and we could never all agree on exactly what is level anyway ...
I guess you'd set up a software company that privately develops the software.
Are there scenarios where the community helps write software and gets
cash back from related profits. Could you set up a "Flightgear Foundation" that developed commercially
useable add ons away from the gaze of potential competitors and got cash
back from profits towards things that the community wanted to do ?
Or can open source software be developed privately and then shared at a later date ?
To be clear on this I do understand the point of open source and am a
firm believer in it. I hope this is not seen as a dangerous question.
You are a danger. :-)
To be honest, mixing profit motives with a hobby is a dangerous thing. There are many obvious (and many very subtle) ways we could shoot ourselves in the foot. Anything we would do would need to be approached very cautiously and with *much* thought. And we need to be realistic, money has to come from somewhere. That implies that we would need to do or promise something of enough value that people would be willing to part with their money and willingly give it to us. If we have a commercial product then we need to compete with products like MSFS and X-Plane and try to match them fluff-4-fluff. Research money is an option, but that is an entirely different ball game and has it's own large set of head aches.
I think the question to ask (if we are interested in finding some sort of money source) is what kind of value can we offer to individuals, companies, research institutions? Courting any of these can require up front cash, long term risk, lots of sales work, etc.
I tend to think that FlightGear in and of itself is too loose of an organization to effectively go after money sources like this. We will have better luck if individuals (who are part of some company, or part of some research group) work to get FlightGear used as part of their projects and do whatever they can to contribute the results back to the project. These companies or research institutions might do well to occasionally consider hiring a FlightGear developer to help with their project ...
Regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org
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