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Comment by faeyanpiraat | Hacker News Reader

How can you make money on linux?

Correction: I understood the original comment as developing software for linux and getting paid for it, and not using it to make web apps, doing web development is platform independent obviously..

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Not easy at all, but I have a day job (outside of IT). The way would be to build web apps / SaaS and also move more into B2B as consumer facing software would be better built natively for their target operating systems (Apple / Windows / etc)

I’m moving more into technical software, so I couldn’t afford more than half my potential user base saying Oh I don’t have a Mac

Not easy? The internet basically runs on linux

Yes but for the single programmer working by himself or herself, its much more palatable to build an app for iOS / MacOS and monetize from it. I believe that is the direction of the parent comment that I replied to. Many things run on linux but they are also very big softwares run by large teams

If a vendor runs a website to sell their wares that happens to run on linux, then yes it's "easy" to make money on linux. If you are a developer trying to make money on some software you've created specifically for linux, then it's a different thing entirely.

While not exactly being what you're referring to (I believe you're solely referring to something akin to enterprise-esque application development), there are many jobs out there for those of us who build entire distros for public (and private) entities to consume. This ranges from automotive, to defense, to open source OSes like Ubuntu, SUSE, CentOS, etc.

I used to work at a company in the chip-design software space that built Linux-only software for $100k/user/year, so there's definitely money to be made for Linux (even if it happens to be niche software).

> How can you make money on linux?

Doesn't the vast majority of the world's commercial software run on Linux?

I’m skeptic of that. Adobe, Oracle, Altium, and MANY other enterprise level software suites are Windows only.

You mean desktop software? What proportion of software use is that? Absolutely tiny, I'd imagine.

Why would you think that?

What do you think it's running on? Data centres full of Macs and Windows machines?

Why would most commercial software be on data center computers? Where do these assumptions come from?

I don't understand - do you think most services are run from someone's random desktop? That's not the way it works in the real world.

To be clear, you think most commercial software runs on linux because you think most commercial software is services running in data centers?

Data centres, back-office server cabinets, bank main-frames, embedded devices, POS, handled devices. Where do you think it's running? On Dell Opterons on people's desks running Windows? That's not how it's worked for decades.

Not how what worked? 95% of desktops are windows or mac, 99% of mobile are android and iOS. That is computers sold, business included. What is this hallucination that all programs are some sort of command line chron job?

https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.asp...

> 95% of desktops are windows or mac, 99% of mobile are android and iOS. That is computers sold, business included.

But that isn't where most software runs. Most people just run a browser or a couple of desktop apps locally.

The vast majority of software is embedded or in data centres, running on Linux or iOS as an exceptional case.

Think about how many services you interact with daily - how many websites, payment services, bank systems, networking systems, other online computer systems in your life. You probably interact with hundreds of such systems every day not always realising it. Compared to what... three or four desktop apps maybe?

Many poorer people don't even own a desktop or laptop at all - so they interact with zero desktop apps but still hundreds of services via their (Linux) phones.

> What is this hallucination that all programs are some sort of command line chron job?

That's literally what most programs are - services providing an API or a web UI running as a command line program in a data centre.

To recap, you made a nonsensical hyperbolic statement that is heavily contradicted by real numbers of what computers people buy and use, then say that web pages served from open source software are "running commercial software" while the computers that display and run the web page don't count. Do I have all of this right?

Not sure why you're being so confrontational about this?

It's not about how many computers - it's about where most software is running - those are two different things.

> then say that web pages served from open source software are "running commercial software"

Yes websites are commercial software. I don't understand what's confusing about that? Facebook is commercial software. It runs on Linux. It makes billions of dollars. Thousands and thousands of engineers working on it are making money on Linux.

So instead of commercial software you meant internal command line scripts and instead of running on you meant serving up web pages and instead of on linux, you meant using linux and open source web servers and instead of most commercial software you meant a single company that makes money and instead of numbers you meant guesses. Seems like a bit of a stretch. Seems like you just like to make nonsense claims and backpeddle instead of admitting they are ridiculous.

Sorry your comment doesn't really make sense to me.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, are all examples of massive successful commercial applications running on Linux.

The original question was 'How can you make money on linux?'

The answer is these companies and more make billions, and the employees make hundreds of thousands, all writing applications on Linux. Most developers I know make money writing applications on Linux.

You originally said "most commercial software runs on linux" and when people told you that is a bold and possibly ridiculous thing to say, your response is 'these big websites make a lot of money and the people I know work on linux'.

Do you think that might not be indicative of the big picture? If you lived on the equator would you say "no one really needs a thick warm coat, no one I know has one" ?

I'm fascinated that you don't want to look beyond local anecdotes for real systemic information.

Out of the top 25 websites in the world, only 2 aren’t using Linux.

96.3% of the world’s top 1 million servers run on Linux.

90% of all cloud infrastructure operates on Linux.

https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/linux-statistics/

Even at Microsoft they run most stuff on Linux.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-developer-reveals-li...

72% of phones are running Linux.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Look at any tech jobs site. How many jobs are for writing Microsoft Windows or macOS desktop or iOS phone software compared to for writing Linux applications? A tiny tiny proportion.

I was wondering when android would become "running on linux"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Lin...

To be clear, if you were in a meeting at work and your boss asked you how to make money programming for linux, you would say to write Android apps, and you think that no one would roll their eyes from you purposely ignoring the point of the question to say something that is pragmatically nonsense and only makes sense in an extremely warped redefinition of a question?

Be a web developer. Web works just fine on Linux.

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