Bob Ippolito wrote:
I'm definitely interested in these things (more some than others), but I'm currently professionally committed to some other stuff. The real problem I'd have with this sort of business venture is doing it in a way that's compatible with open source, but still making enough money to keep doing it without spending too much time doing consulting.
Well, aside form the fact hat I'm no businessman, that's one of my show stoppers too. I'm not sure how to balance open source and trying to make a profit.
I'd definitely want to give these things away as liberally licensed open source,
I would too, but I'm not sure there's a business plan there. Another idea was to open source what has always worked well as open source: the core libraries, like whatever GUI toolkit was used, be it improvements to an existing one, or something done just for this. The nifty, easy-for-newbies IDEs are kind of more of a natural for proprietary projects, as has been discussed here.
which might mean that it has to be done in the context of a non-profit foundation (like Chandler via OSAF).
That would be nice, but I have even less of an idea how to get money for hat than I do getting venture capital to start a business. However, perhaps this is just what one poster proposed: the PSF could fund a good cross-platform IDE.
However, it might be possible to get away on a smaller scale by simply having a set of robust open source tools as the "lite" version, and a "pro" version with a couple nice extra features that isn't free (like the difference between OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle Pro).
Another good idea, but we'd still need the start-up money!
-Chris
--
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer
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