On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 20:16 +0530, Ankit Malik wrote:

Hi

I know this is an old question! In fact I have asked this at loads of places but with no satisfactory answer.

I hope you guys answer it >>

"Mr. X is a software developer. He develops a Software Y and releases it as free [as in freedom and beer] So how does he earn money"

This has been answered too many times. I will try to answer it the way I have been convinced.

The question you ask is generally asked by people who think making products is the only way to make money. Such people are normally lured by the prospect of creating product once and selling it multiple times and getting rich quick.

These same people somehow miss out all the people working around him - the plumber, the carpenter, the accountant, the banker, the electrician ... all the people who earn by selling their *services*. In fact, the service sector of the economy far surpasses the product oriented sector.

Just like only the FMCG (Fast moving consumer goods) area of our product economy will always make money, similarly niche fields in software products (like accounting software which needs to be updated every year or anti-virus software) will always make money.

And like the rest of the real world products like refrigerators, fridges whose markets become saturated over time, long-term software products (like Commercial operating systems) will also get saturated.

Sooner or later long-term software producers have to turn to a service model to ensure constant revenue stream.

In short, software products anyway dont work well in the long term. Services always will (even though they would not give you any sharp spikes in revenue like products).

FOSS offers the best option for software developers worldwide to develop a common public body of software and then sell it in their local market as a service. Over time this common software treasure will only get richer as no proprietary company can afford to maintain such a huge amount of software at such a scale of human effort.

Coming back to your question...

So this said person gives away his software for free, and sells the service of installing it for his clients. No body knows the software as well as he does, and not all clients want to mess around with hacking a software to customize to their needs. So this guy is bound to get work based on his services. IF he has a get-rich-quick idea in mind, I am sorry, but FOSS isn't his area. Let him stick to closed source - in which case there is a 90+% chance that he will fail (in keeping with market norm).

- Sandip

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Sandip Bhattacharya * Puroga Technologies * sandip@puroga.com Work: http://www.puroga.com * Home/Blog: http://www.sandipb.net/blog

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On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 20:16:59 +0530, Ankit Malik ankitmalik@gmail.com wrote: [...]

"Mr. X is a software developer. He develops a Software Y and releases it as free [as in freedom and beer] So how does he earn money"

There's few good articles on the http://www.gnu.org site. I would also suggest these books:

1) The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber 2) Free for All: How LINUX and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans by Peter Wayner 3) Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity -- by Lawrence Lessig (not techinicall related with Free software, but same philiosophy).