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I avoid proprietary software as much as I can, but if Free Software will ever be truly vindicated, I have a feeling it will happen via business applications. C

I avoid proprietary software as much as I can, but if Free Software will ever be truly vindicated, I have a feeling it will happen via business applications. Convincing a sizable portion of consumers to even try free software--much less pay for it--is pretty much a lost cause. Consumers have made it abundantly clear they value convenience and "free" (as in gratis) over freedom, privacy, customizability, and any other ideal or benefit we can try to sell them on. The best hope for consumers is for a set of profitable, high-quality, free business software companies to rise, and for some of those companies to devote money, dev time, ingenuity, and vision to solving consumer problems. You cannot take on proprietary software with ideals alone; you need resources.

swellep 9y ago
Like Winrar
- davexunit 9y ago
  Winrar is proprietary.
mikekchar 9y ago
On the other hand, most larger proprietary software businesses devote a surprisingly small amount of their operating budget to development. In my experience it's usually around 10%, but it depends on the company. I certainly haven't heard of anyone spending more than about 30% and there are quite a few big names that spend in the low single digits. Potentially, if you can leverage the benefits of free software to pay for some of the things you would usually have to manage yourself, then perhaps you can reach some kind of parity even if the vast majority of users do not pay money for the software. Mozilla currently pulls in relatively huge amounts of cash (hundreds of millions per year), but when they first started it was considerably smaller. Because they were able to concentrate on development rather than marketing and sales, they were able to get quite a lot done with that money. Where they did spend on marketing (for example the famous New York Times ad), they were quite careful about it. There are other successful free software plays. For me the biggest example is Red Hat. When these kinds of conversations appear, I always point people toward Michael Tiemann's chapter in "Open Sources: Voices From the Open Source Revolution" [0]. Cygnus software went from $6K to being sold to Red Hat for $600M, and Red Hat went on to great success with essentially the same business model. My favourite quote from that chapter, talking about discussing his ideas for a free software business model: "I never got farther than 'It's a great idea, but . . .,' when I had my second insight: if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!" Even now, I think there is virtually no competition in Red Hat's space because nobody thinks their business model will work. In the end, I think that developing free software business models is where it has to go. You can't charge for the software. I personally feel that dual licensing is not really a free software business model because you don't actually make money from free software -- you are just using it as a loss leader for your traditional proprietary software. Like you imply, in the enterprise space you can probably do well (for example, by copying Red Hat, or by making a foundation like Mozilla or Apache). But there is a lot of other software out there. I think in those spaces you have to be a lot more creative about what you charge money for. People will clearly spend money -- just look at the horrible, horrible "free to play" game market. The trick is to allow them to do so in a non-horrible way ;-) [0] - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.html http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.htm...
- rwallace 9y ago
  > On the other hand, most larger proprietary software businesses devote a surprisingly small amount of their operating budget to development. In my experience it's usually around 10%, but it depends on the company. I certainly haven't heard of anyone spending more than about 30% and there are quite a few big names that spend in the low single digits. Now I'm curious; what else do they spend money on? Sales and marketing of course, but what else?
  - ralmidani 9y ago
    Lawyers and lobbyists?
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    Generally speaking it doesn't include management (except for immediate dev management). It also doesn't include support or operations (in a software company that would include secretaries, security, cleaning staff, etc). It usually doesn't include capital expenses either, so depending on how you do the accounting, things like running the building is not included. From that perspective, the numbers can be a bit deceiving. Depending on the area, the costs can swing wildly. I worked at Corel back when shrink wrapped software was a thing. Sales channels cost huge amounts of money. Even after that period getting your software into OEM builds cost a fortune. That's stuck in "costs of sales", usually. I've worked at companies where costs of sales was well over 50% of revenue. As you can imagine, there is considerable latitude for corruption ;-). If you are running a service, "operations" often pays for compute infrastructure, but it depends entirely on the company. You might even have dev ops in operations so that can be misleading because you don't have a product without the service. My experience has been that management, operations and sales takes 60-70% of revenue. The absolutely necessary expenses in operations usually amount to less than 10%. Capital expenses can be very large if they are investing in real estate or something similar, so that's a complete wild card. Sales and marketing are kind of linked because usually you have to spend more on one if you spend less on the other. How much you can get away with if you change the business model is kind of up in the air and I'm really speculating when I suggest that a free software model will be cheaper -- I believe it, but obviously have zero data. It's worth downloading quarterly/year end reports from various high tech companies and reading them. It's pretty incredible how much information you can get from them. They won't break down everything exactly the way you want, but you can usually figure it out -- and often see pretty plainly where they are playing games. Complete diversion: One of Corel's favourite tricks in the past (though not now, I think -- everything changed after they were sold) was to overfill the sales channel in first quarter. Basically they would "sell" the software to dealers, but would provide "refunds" for software that wasn't sold by the end of 4th quarter. So 1st quarter was always massively positive, while they were always massively (and somehow unexpectedly) in the red by 4th quarter. Executive stock options were granted 4th quarter and there was a trading window in second quarter. So the stock would plunge dramatically (one or two binary orders of magnitude) just before the stock options were granted and then rocket back up in time to sell them. They did that year after year after year (I was there for 5 years and it happened every time). The reason for the swings was literally written in the quarterly reports. In first quarter they would say "We sold $X, but this is subject to 4th quarter refunds". Then in fourth quarter they would say, "We experienced a one time loss from refunds in the sales channel". I swear nobody reads those quarterly reports... :-P
busterarm 9y ago
I feel like the best and largest OSS projects are already this...at least a sizable portion of them. On the other hand, I don't quite know where I stand on accepting donations for writing free software. I feel like it leads to perverse incentives for maintainers and contributors alike. My feeling here is that the best way to earn a living off of OSS is writing books about it, selling support, speaking engagements, etc. Someday I would like to earn a living from writing OSS, but I'm not super-inclined to do these other things either. That really just leaves working for a company like RedHat, and drawing a salary to write OSS. That just means your work isn't self-directed anymore. What I'd really like to see happen, if it hasn't happened already, is a funding platform that only accepts donations from "qualified donors" and funds a small, curated list of projects/people and anonymizes whose funding goes to what projects/people. Projects/People are selected by a mix of donor votes, community votes and some equivalent of PageRank. Funding allocation is split up the same way, trying to divert the most money to the highest-impact people & projects. Not that I have the slightest inclination that anyone would want to use this :(
- ksk 9y ago
  What you're saying basically looks like a representative government. The government collects taxes, and you don't control where the money specifically goes. You elect representatives who control where the money goes, etc. We all know how that turns out. :(
  - busterarm 9y ago
    Nope. The donors don't have control, only influence - a vote that contributes to some algorithmic determination. Any stakeholder gets to participate, including the people/projects being funded.
ksk 9y ago
But business software is super boring, takes forever to please the customer who typically is difficult to deal with, wants the UI buttons in specific places, the data entry form to be in a specific format, etc etc. Why would anyone want to work on that? Open Source works primarily because the software you work on, you're personally invested in it, and you care about it, and its about scratching an itch. When you tell people to 'follow their passion', nobody is going to want to clean the toilets and mop the floors.

swellep 9y ago

Like Winrar

davexunit 9y ago
Winrar is proprietary.

mikekchar 9y ago

On the other hand, most larger proprietary software businesses devote a surprisingly small amount of their operating budget to development. In my experience it's usually around 10%, but it depends on the company. I certainly haven't heard of anyone spending more than about 30% and there are quite a few big names that spend in the low single digits. Potentially, if you can leverage the benefits of free software to pay for some of the things you would usually have to manage yourself, then perhaps you can reach some kind of parity even if the vast majority of users do not pay money for the software. Mozilla currently pulls in relatively huge amounts of cash (hundreds of millions per year), but when they first started it was considerably smaller. Because they were able to concentrate on development rather than marketing and sales, they were able to get quite a lot done with that money. Where they did spend on marketing (for example the famous New York Times ad), they were quite careful about it. There are other successful free software plays. For me the biggest example is Red Hat. When these kinds of conversations appear, I always point people toward Michael Tiemann's chapter in "Open Sources: Voices From the Open Source Revolution" [0]. Cygnus software went from $6K to being sold to Red Hat for $600M, and Red Hat went on to great success with essentially the same business model. My favourite quote from that chapter, talking about discussing his ideas for a free software business model: "I never got farther than 'It's a great idea, but . . .,' when I had my second insight: if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!" Even now, I think there is virtually no competition in Red Hat's space because nobody thinks their business model will work. In the end, I think that developing free software business models is where it has to go. You can't charge for the software. I personally feel that dual licensing is not really a free software business model because you don't actually make money from free software -- you are just using it as a loss leader for your traditional proprietary software. Like you imply, in the enterprise space you can probably do well (for example, by copying Red Hat, or by making a foundation like Mozilla or Apache). But there is a lot of other software out there. I think in those spaces you have to be a lot more creative about what you charge money for. People will clearly spend money -- just look at the horrible, horrible "free to play" game market. The trick is to allow them to do so in a non-horrible way ;-) [0] - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.html http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.htm...

rwallace 9y ago
> On the other hand, most larger proprietary software businesses devote a surprisingly small amount of their operating budget to development. In my experience it's usually around 10%, but it depends on the company. I certainly haven't heard of anyone spending more than about 30% and there are quite a few big names that spend in the low single digits. Now I'm curious; what else do they spend money on? Sales and marketing of course, but what else?
- ralmidani 9y ago
  Lawyers and lobbyists?
- mikekchar 9y ago
  Generally speaking it doesn't include management (except for immediate dev management). It also doesn't include support or operations (in a software company that would include secretaries, security, cleaning staff, etc). It usually doesn't include capital expenses either, so depending on how you do the accounting, things like running the building is not included. From that perspective, the numbers can be a bit deceiving. Depending on the area, the costs can swing wildly. I worked at Corel back when shrink wrapped software was a thing. Sales channels cost huge amounts of money. Even after that period getting your software into OEM builds cost a fortune. That's stuck in "costs of sales", usually. I've worked at companies where costs of sales was well over 50% of revenue. As you can imagine, there is considerable latitude for corruption ;-). If you are running a service, "operations" often pays for compute infrastructure, but it depends entirely on the company. You might even have dev ops in operations so that can be misleading because you don't have a product without the service. My experience has been that management, operations and sales takes 60-70% of revenue. The absolutely necessary expenses in operations usually amount to less than 10%. Capital expenses can be very large if they are investing in real estate or something similar, so that's a complete wild card. Sales and marketing are kind of linked because usually you have to spend more on one if you spend less on the other. How much you can get away with if you change the business model is kind of up in the air and I'm really speculating when I suggest that a free software model will be cheaper -- I believe it, but obviously have zero data. It's worth downloading quarterly/year end reports from various high tech companies and reading them. It's pretty incredible how much information you can get from them. They won't break down everything exactly the way you want, but you can usually figure it out -- and often see pretty plainly where they are playing games. Complete diversion: One of Corel's favourite tricks in the past (though not now, I think -- everything changed after they were sold) was to overfill the sales channel in first quarter. Basically they would "sell" the software to dealers, but would provide "refunds" for software that wasn't sold by the end of 4th quarter. So 1st quarter was always massively positive, while they were always massively (and somehow unexpectedly) in the red by 4th quarter. Executive stock options were granted 4th quarter and there was a trading window in second quarter. So the stock would plunge dramatically (one or two binary orders of magnitude) just before the stock options were granted and then rocket back up in time to sell them. They did that year after year after year (I was there for 5 years and it happened every time). The reason for the swings was literally written in the quarterly reports. In first quarter they would say "We sold $X, but this is subject to 4th quarter refunds". Then in fourth quarter they would say, "We experienced a one time loss from refunds in the sales channel". I swear nobody reads those quarterly reports... :-P

busterarm 9y ago

I feel like the best and largest OSS projects are already this...at least a sizable portion of them. On the other hand, I don't quite know where I stand on accepting donations for writing free software. I feel like it leads to perverse incentives for maintainers and contributors alike. My feeling here is that the best way to earn a living off of OSS is writing books about it, selling support, speaking engagements, etc. Someday I would like to earn a living from writing OSS, but I'm not super-inclined to do these other things either. That really just leaves working for a company like RedHat, and drawing a salary to write OSS. That just means your work isn't self-directed anymore. What I'd really like to see happen, if it hasn't happened already, is a funding platform that only accepts donations from "qualified donors" and funds a small, curated list of projects/people and anonymizes whose funding goes to what projects/people. Projects/People are selected by a mix of donor votes, community votes and some equivalent of PageRank. Funding allocation is split up the same way, trying to divert the most money to the highest-impact people & projects. Not that I have the slightest inclination that anyone would want to use this :(

ksk 9y ago
What you're saying basically looks like a representative government. The government collects taxes, and you don't control where the money specifically goes. You elect representatives who control where the money goes, etc. We all know how that turns out. :(
- busterarm 9y ago
  Nope. The donors don't have control, only influence - a vote that contributes to some algorithmic determination. Any stakeholder gets to participate, including the people/projects being funded.

ksk 9y ago

But business software is super boring, takes forever to please the customer who typically is difficult to deal with, wants the UI buttons in specific places, the data entry form to be in a specific format, etc etc. Why would anyone want to work on that? Open Source works primarily because the software you work on, you're personally invested in it, and you care about it, and its about scratching an itch. When you tell people to 'follow their passion', nobody is going to want to clean the toilets and mop the floors.