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Comment by sgrove | Hacker News Reader

Witten actually gave me quite a bit of advice on open sourcing my application, and he mentioned quite a few of these points. I think there might have been some additional benefits as far as marketing/legitimacy are concerned that he might have mentioned, but he makes a good case for selling open-sourced software.

Depending on your market, only a small minority are driven to invest the energy (time is money) required to get no-cost software - paying someone to have a ready-to-go package is simply more efficient.

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I believe he misses some important points:

(1) The core problem are professional "free-riders" -- Linux distributions being the main candidates. As soon as they include his software in their repositories, his sales will probably stop to increase.

(2) For Linux distributions, it's also hard to make ready-to-go packages. Looking at his download page, there's no sign whether his package installs properly. Can I even use it? Is it RPM or DEP? Or some sort of .run package that needs to be made executable, first?

(3) Expensive software is unlikely to be sold under an Open Source license: think dental office billing systems, for example. Everything more expensive than, say, $25 will make people get the software elsewhere or use the source.

Nevertheless, I agree that selling open source software may provide some benefits for the seller.

1. I've actually considered not charging for the Linux version and only charging for the Windows and Mac versions. From a cultural perspective, Linux users simply don't buy software. No value judgment there, but simply a statement of fact. (I'm a Linux user myself.)

2. I don't yet have official packaging yet for Linux, but I plan to start with Ubuntu and Debian debs when I do. Right now it's just a tarball.

3. You're probably right that expensive software is going to be a harder sell when the source code is available for free. When I wrote the article, I had end-user software in mind, which generally isn't that expensive.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I thought you meant selling open source, in general, not just to end users.

You know, I'm glad you submitted your post here. I'm currently working on an article about a similiar topic. The discussion has been very helpful.

Would you mind if I contact you directly using your support E-Mail adress? I'd be really interested in your feedback.

No problem. You're welcome to email me.

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