On Wednesday 29 December 2010 08:58 PM, Sagar Belure wrote: > Hi all, > > Maybe I'm asking another noob question. > But, wanted to know, how the big companies gain profit who run Free > and Open Source project like Mozilla, Apache, etc. > Of course, even if you are working for Free and Open source projects, > there has to be some income. > >
IMHO, there is a lot of variation in the term software and profit. Within closed and open software you have further sub divisions like serviceable or non-serviceable. Non-serviceable are one time installations that do not require any service intervention, like browsers, office suites, multimedia players. They are installed once and except for installing a new version, there is no maintainance required during their usage. Therefore such FOSS software will rely on donations and sponsorships. Serviceable ones are like accounting, database, operating systems, server systems. These require regular maintainance as they process critical and valuable data. The developers can make good money by providing good service for the software they develop. Within these parameters there is also another variation, whether you are distributing the software to a customer privately or you are putting it on the web for anyone to download. If you are distributing it privately, you can still make one time profit on the non-serviceable FOSS you develop. Now it is up to you to decide what type of software you want to develop, how will you sell it, how will you provide effective maintainance for it to make profit. For more details on individual companies or projects, as others have suggested, do look up google for their success stories. For profit too there is a variation. Do you want to make money enough to recover your development and distribution cost or all that _and_ make a handsome profit over it or do you want to do the above _and_ keep milking your customers for every copy of the software they install, for as many years that you can pull it off. It is need vs greed. If a poor taxiwala overcharges a few rupees during a taxi shortage, he is considered a criminal who should be severely punished. If airline companies form a cartel, create artificial shortage and extremely overcharge their customers, they are respectable blue collared businessmen who simply call it the laws of 'supply and demand'. -- As a proper list etiquette... Please trim your replies. Post your replies below the relevant original text, leaving a line space. Do not re-use old messages to write new ones. Regards, Rony. -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
