On Thursday 13 March 2003 03:07 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Dear all: > > On 2002-11-22 I originated the thread "The OSD and commercial use" on > this list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), about the problem of > selling open source software. After lurking over the ensuing > discussion (thanks guys) I promised to come back with my thereafter > educated reflections. Here they are now, in the form of the teasing > little article reproduced below.
I've listened to both sides of the argument. One side says "you can't make any money selling Open Source Software" and the other side says "yes you can make lots of money selling Open Source Software." Well, BOTH sides are chowderheads! First the "you can't make money" crowd. You're trying to fit OSS into the proprietary business models. That doesn't work. It doesn't work any better than a hunter-gatherer trying to sell nuts and berries in an agricultural marketplace. The economic systems are just too different. The successful proprietary model of pretending to sell the software while really selling the license obviously doesn't work with OSS simply because the definition won't allow you to. A more realistic model of actually selling the software (without the license bait-and-switch) does work, but not very well. The reason you know all too well: it's hard to charge money for stuff that's free. As long as you try to stick Open Source Software into a shrink wrapped box with a price slapped on the side, you will not succeed. Okay, now to be fair, I'll pick on the "but you can make money" crowd. I don't know of one business that is making any money selling Open Source Software. But I do know a tiny handful that are managing to evade bankruptcy by begging for donations. A few others are actually making a few bucks selling free beer, but you can count them on one hand with enough fingers left over to pick both nostrils. The stories of people getting rich off of Open Source Software are isolated anecdotes, most of which date back to the dot.boom era when you could make money just by promising to burn it when it came your way. Note: People make money selling bottled water simply because in their particular marketplaces clean and pure water is NOT free. You don't see people with artesian wells buying bottled water. The real truth is somewhere in the middle. You can make money off of Open Source software, perhaps even decent worthwhile money. But you won't see any billionaires and precious few millionaires. So get that kind of thinking out of your head right at the beginning. How do you make money off of Open Source? The exact same way you make money off of anything else. Find out what the customer wants and can't get and sell it to them. That means you can't sell them the software because they can already get that without you, and for a much lower cost. I'll finish off with an example: Two weeks ago my company needed a specialized RAID solution. The two options were a proprietary solution and an Open Source Solution. The proprietary solution was expensive, but it was ready to implement immediately. The Open Source solution was free, but it wasn't ready and didn't come with any support to get it ready for us. At a less critical time we might have gone with the Open Source solution. But we need the stuff immediately, so we bought the proprietary product. My company didn't care whether it was free and open or proprietary and closed. Now here's the crucial point: if this proprietary solution was Open Source but identical in all other ways, we would have STILL chosen it! The software business world needs to stop complaining that you can't sell free beer. And the Open Source world needs to stop insisting that Open Source isn't free beer. -- David Johnson ___________________ http://www.usermode.org -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3