On Friday 28 November 2008, Tal Abir wrote: > Hi, > Lets say you wrote a utility that may be useful to others. > Why would you open source it? > How can you earn money from opening the code and giving it for free?
ESR gives some business models for FOSS here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ Since this article was writtem, other business models emerged. You can provide paid support or services for the program you wrote. You can provide your library under a SleepyCat/GPL-like licence and charge people for the ability to link against it without having to open their sources as well. There may be other models that I forgot about momentarily. Regardless of this, not all people think about money first when considering to release their programs as open-source. For them, using an open-source licence implies that more people can benefit from their work, and as a result fewer problems will have to be solved twice (see http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html ). > Source forge is making money from hosting your utility, Wikipedia is making > money from documenting it, what is left for the developer? Well, Sourceforge is not charging money for hosting your project. It make money from ads and donations. Wikipedia does not aim to provide user or developer documentation for the project. It provides Encyclopedia-like information, which cannot compensate for a developer documenting his project. And sometimes pages for FOSS projects are not present in the wikipedia or are even deleted due to "lack of notability". Wikipedia does not charge for creating such content or making it available, and makes it money from donations. As for the developer - he still owns the rights for the code, and has the best familiarity with it (that's not the scope of such sites as you describe) and he can charge for licensing it differently or for providing services and support. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ First stop for Perl beginners - http://perl-begin.org/ Shlomi, so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit testing fortunes in freecell? -- Ran Eilam _______________________________________________ Haifux mailing list [email protected] http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haifux
