How does a software company make money, if all software is free? | Hacker News Reader

How does a software company make money, if all software is free?

gapingvoid.com

9 pointsrevorad9 comments

"If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community."

That's always sounded better than it is. My experience of contacting technical support with any proprietary vendor is the usual tale of being put on hold, messed about for days or weeks, waiting ages for a response to my emails. I started and finished a job with a company last year; it lasted 6 months. The first call I opened was with Sun, and it was still open when I left.

Anyway, the 90s just called, and they want their tired old debate back. Companies do make money off open source, it is used in all kinds of businesses, you can get support in a variety of ways and save a ton of cash in the process. The question in the OP is valid, but it was answered a long, long time ago. The best answers came from companies like Google, Red Hat, MySQL, etc, etc.

When you go beyond the consumer web and desktop markets, software actually sells for a lot of money. There are tons of industry-specific and line of business software markets that are very lucrative, but they aren't immediately obvious to an outsider.

He conveniently forgot to mention that most (if not all) "open source companies" do not pay their programmers to write open sourced code. Most of them simply take what's been done by others, repackage and then "sell as a service" essentially profiting on someone else's sweat. Periodically these companies feel a bit guilty and find ways to contribute back, usually in very insignificant ways, but most are just parasites.

Google, Yahoo and most other "OSS-friendly" companies built their stuff on top of mountains of open sourced code that they had no chance of re-creating commercially, yet only tiny, truly negligible percent of their own code is available for others to use and benefit from. In that regard you have to respect Microsoft, whose programmers essentially coded their way from the bottom (at company's expense): from boot loaders to OS and compilers and hardware drivers - they've done it all.

Yes, the Future is to have all the programmers sit at home and build products for free, and then take it and make money on "service and contracts". Why the hell not, especially for Sun, who's never been successful in commercial software business and has always looked at software only as a free commodity that helps to sell their expensive servers.

I'd love to see how these OSS-friends would react if GPL required them to publish code of everything they use it for, not just the products they allow customers to copy. Heck, I'd love to hack around with original BigTable and MapReduce code, I am sure GCC/Linux hackers would do too.

I see the very same attitude here on YC.news, when every 18 year old with a weekend project is looking for VC funding and educating himself on business plans as opposed to just simply posting it to sourceforge, just like programmers, whose libraries represent 99% of his codebase, have done.

You might find this interesting, if you haven't read it already:

Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158895

sigh

All together now: Open source is a software development model, not a business model.

Someones got to pay. May be other revenue streams subsidizing the open source work. But its naive to believe that support & services alone can sustain a software producer.

Imagine would Red Hat be able to sell its version of Linux for the cost that it does if it were to produce the whole thing? Remember the guy who contributes to the overall effort cannot live on air and water. Could be large corporations(IBM, Sun) or the State(any country with strong social security, free education etc), putting the money to support the people working on open source.

From the article: "What strikes me as particularly entertaining is that, if their product/service offerings ARE comparable or better than Big Business offerings, perhaps if they turned their passion outwards instead of just ranting and gushing to each other and at you, more of the world might know about it and they might get more market traction and be greater catalysts for competition and change within their industries."

This is exactly why open source software isn't more popular than it is.

Maybe it is time to get some open source marketers on board?

By selling support and services. For example, take a look at Al Fresco.

Additionally you could sell add-ons and upgrades.

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