Why Use an Open Source Licence?
OK, imagine if you will, that I suddenly developed uber programming skills and coded a great application for – lets say – keeping track of properties in an estate agency.
At this point I’m faced with a couple of choices (but please add more if you think of any):
1) Provide my software under a proprietary licence, charging my customer for both the software and my support of the software
2) Provide my software under an open-source licence, giving away the source code for free, but selling my support to the customer
At this point hypothetical software vendor Chris (much to freedom loving Chris’s disappointment) leans towards model 1. In this way I keep the source code of my uber application and corner the estate agent market.
As an advocate (albeit user of) open source software, my internal freedom loving Chris urges me to learn what the business benefits (to the vendor) of the open-source licensing model are.
Can anyone steer me in the right direction?
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Tags: open source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Post to del.icio.us
Post to Slashdot
Digg this
January 14th, 2008 at 12:37 am
“imagine if you will, that I suddenly developed uber programming skills and coded a great application”
I would say that your premises are not the ones for the question at hand.
Ask yourself, where do you want to end up with your application?
January 14th, 2008 at 1:30 am
you might want to take a look at the fsf philosophy on selling free software http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
keeping the source code free is about making sure that your freedoms as a coder are protected and the users freedoms as a user are protected, not about just releasing all the code to a communitiy. you can for example not only charge for support, but also say a company wanted 100 systems setup with your software, you know it the best thus they can pay you to set it up perfectly, or if a company needs a feature you can impliment it for a fee.
also if your software becomes big enough and a company relys on it they might consider bringing you on their staff to maintain it or whatever. you just have to get it out of your head that keeping the source closed and restricting peoples freedom is the only way to make money from software.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Hi Serge, Gord,
The thing that would worry me (if I had to make a living out of software – which I don’t…) is this.
Say I did release software under the GPL.
What’s to stop a larger and more recognisable business from providing support for my software cheaper or better than I can? In that case couldn’t a coder literally be priced out of supporting his/her own software?
@ Gord
I understand (I think) the concept of software freedom. But what confuses me is why would a coder be financially better off releasing his/her code via an open source route?
Sure, it’s possible to make money without keeping source closed. But what’s the business proposition in doing so?
Freedom is great, but people still have mouths to feed, and convincing them to release their work under the FOSS route is going to be hard if we can’t convince them that it’s the best thing to do to develop their businesses.
January 14th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
The most convincing argument to me is that the open source route means other people can cooperate with you to make the software better, making it more attractive to potential users, and giving you a larger pool of people to extract money from. It’s a smaller slice of a bigger pie type thing (and a better chance of their being a pie at all).
It doesn’t always work, but neither does keeping the source to yourself.
@3: Have you ever tried getting support from a big company?
Competing with them isn’t hard.
January 14th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
The models are more complex than that. It’s ACTUALLY a choice between:
1: Start with a blank sheet of paper. Develop software from scratch. Sell a “licence”, and make your money that way.
2: Start with an OSS application someone else has written. Tweak that, maybe by adding a module. Release under an appropriate OSS licence, and make your money selling services and support.
It’s not the “revenue” side of the equation only… it’s the fact that by starting with an OSS application, you could chop 90% out of your development cost…. so create 10 times as many applications with the same programming team.
January 14th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
“What’s to stop a larger and more recognisable business from providing support for my software cheaper or better than I can? In that case couldn’t a coder literally be priced out of supporting his/her own software?”
*no one* knows the codebase better than you and that is worth a hell of a lot, sure some big company could say ‘have you tried turning it off and on again?’ but you don’t want to do that kind of support, you get the big jobs
.
“I understand (I think) the concept of software freedom. But what confuses me is why would a coder be financially better off releasing his/her code via an open source route?”
often you won’t be financially better off, the free software movement is still in its infancy and being one of the trailblazers of the movement isn’t easy when everyone else gets to make money by forcing the users to give up their freedoms.
essentially if all you care about is money then your gonna end up down the non-free route, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t make money from free software, indeed if its good enough and you have a good bussiness head (or hire someone who does) then you can make a lot from it, definatly enough to feed those mouths. don’t expect to release your code and the phone start ringing though.