UbuntuHelp:Forum/software/OpenSource/MakeMoneyHowto
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How do you make money from Free-libre open source software? How can I write an application that I can sell for money, but instead make money by distributing it under the GPL? That's a good question. Free-libre software is not property. That's the fundemantal difference between an operating system like Ubuntu and one like Windows. FLOSS (Free-Libre Open Source Software)developers do not think that software is intellectual property in the same way that a book or a piece of music is. Your computer is a bunch of plastic and metal without the software. Unless the software is open, you do not really own your computer. As many things get more and more reliant on computer technology, it becomes somewhat of a "rights and freedoms" question - if your computer is a black box that is supposed to do a certain thing with your data (like personal information) how can you be sure it is really doing it? Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut? Also, it costs money to produce and distribute goods. Software has a very very small cost for distribution. The software industry is more of a services industry than a material goods one. Add to that the fact that code reuse is a basic tennet of good software development, the principle of sharing code; obliging code distributed under the GPL to be available allows for developers to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and not have to reinvent the wheel every time they need to solve a problem. So, no, you cannot compare a free-libre software project to a shrink-wrapped, store-bought software project. You don't sell free software that way. Actually, only a very small amount of software made by professional (paid) developers ends up being sold that way. The majority of software written around the world is for in-house, custom-built applications. Companies with mission-critical needs spend part of their software budget on licencing, and the rest on support and services. They pay programmers to build and improve existing software to fit their needs. The free-libre software business model is one of services and support. Think of Google. They make tons of money, but you don't pay for google searches. Whould they even be in business if they sold their internet searches? Would people have ever started using google if they had to pay 99 cents per search? Maybe, but then again, someone would have come along and offered the same service for free and taken all the business. Google make money by offering services related to web searches (among other things) Like advertisements and selling web-statistics data. They would not be successsful at it if they did not have the most use. In the same way, free-libre software companies maintain and distribute the code freely, and companies that need to use it for mission-crittical operations pay for professional services and support, such as feature customisations and maintenance. At then end of the day, a developer working for a proprietary software house does not keep the code he has written. It belongs to his employer. A free-libre developer gets to keep the code, since it belongs to everybody, as well as his paycheck. Suggested reading about open source software: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ http://firstmonday.org/issues/special10_10/hill/ http://mako.cc/writing/to_fork_or_not_to_fork.html
