Open source turns money-spinner..

[IGBT]

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One very recent open source innovation is Flock, a browser that integrates next-generation web technologies such as RSS, blogs, bookmarks and photo sharing.

In fact the fortunes of open source are closely tied to the internet, as well as the fact that copyright and intellectual property are looking difficult to guarantee. Open source, then, might be a model to flock around.



Rich pickings

The open source movement does not object to making money. In fact, many of these programmers can afford to be choosy about how they earn.

We now have a world that has distribution costs of zero. We have just built a world-wide copying machine called the internet

Karl Fogel, CollabNet
The source code may be free, but there is gold in software support, training and publishing.

Damien Conway, who trains programmers through his business Thoughtstream, said: "I think the most successful of those is definitely licensing support; providing the software and then saying: 'if you want to buy a support contract, here's what it will cost you on an ongoing basis'.

"That way people are getting something that they can work with free if they want to, but when they get into trouble they have backup and you make some money out of it."

 

[Nothinman]

We'll see. People have been talking about making money off of support contracts for a long time and so far it's only worked out for a small handful of companies.

 

[Markbnj]

Yeah, I vote not likely. Providing support is expensive, and maintenance contracts are typically a percentage of the license fee. I can see some small companies making a go of supporting med. sized business on an hourly rate.

 

[xtknight]

It does seem like an extremely good idea, *movie-trailer dude voice* but can it be executed? Only time, will tell...

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
We'll see. People have been talking about making money off of support contracts for a long time and so far it's only worked out for a small handful of companies.

Since when does anything work for more then just a handfull of companies?

Look at how many software developement companies existed a few years ago. You had what? BeOS, VMS, Dr.DOS, Amiga OS, OS/2, etc etc.. and that's just operating systems. Think about how many game makers, applications developers, and the like have been created and destroyed over the years.

Look at the automobile manufacturing also, a different industry. In the beginning of the 1930's there were litterally hundreds of car companies. By the 1950's there were only a dozen or so. Willys, AMC, Kaiser-Frazer, Dodge, GM, Ford, and a handfull of others. Now you only have 3 major car makers.

Look at this list of dead makers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_au...le_manufacturers#Defunct_US_automakers

But I wouldn't say that making cars is unprofitable.

Business is tough. In the beginning of anything your going to have thousands of companies, of people with different ideas, but by the end of the beginning 95% of them will be gone.

 

[Brazen]

I know of two companies out here (middle of Kansas) that have revenues in the millions of dollars that do nothing but support contracts.