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I think you can make money on Open Source, but I think you need partners to do so. I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven op

by jaabe 8y ago

I think you can make money on Open Source, but I think you need partners to do so. I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven open source community called OS2. We’re around 60 members, and we’ve recently won a national award for tech-reuse issued by our ministry of digitisation and around 10 interest groups. We don’t build the code ourselves. We do own, review and manage the code. We handle the project management and we facilitate access to our business processes and employees, but the actual development is something we buy. Once things get build we often end up buying the various projects as SAAS solutions because we aren’t really geared to operate OS techs. We do have excellent federated authentication, network security and API services, but we genuinely don’t want to operate a horde of different tech stacks. This makes us a perfect match for anyone who knows how to do SAAS in the cloud though, and most of the things we build end up being run in Azure or AWS by a supplier. So far it’s been a really beneficial relationship. We get ownership, better quality and faster more agile development. Our local development houses still make money, both from development but also from SAAS. It has been especially good for our smaller dev houses, because a system isn’t locked down to a single supplier for years. This last bit is entirely my personal opinion, but I prefer buying software from a local shop and helping them build and expand their businesses. On the plus side of this, they co-operate a lot better too. Municipalities are trying partners who can’t make up our minds, and a small agile shop who doesn’t point to the 4 year old contract every time you want a tiny change, has just been so refreshing.

TheRealPomax 8y ago
I'm not sure that solution works when you already have a product development model that relies on (literally) tens of thousands of people none of whom trust anyone but you with stewardship of that product. Plus, given the incredible number of partners Mozilla already has, and has had in the past, it feels like the partnership idea is a passed station.
phkahler 8y ago
>> I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven open source community called OS2. We’re around 60 members, and we’ve recently won a national award for tech-reuse issued by our ministry of digitisation and around 10 interest groups. >> We don’t build the code ourselves. We do own, review and manage the code. We handle the project management and we facilitate access to our business processes and employees, but the actual development is something we buy. This sounds like you're treating the software like infrastructure, which is how I've been starting to view it. You contract out the work to maintain it just like roads. It's no surprise to me that you work for a municipality where that's how they get things done. I believe this is what the future of a lot of large software projects looks like. From the developer side people will look just like contractors and their specialization with be which OSS programs they are familiar with - i.e. how fast they can get the desired changes done and into the master branch. There will of course be cheaper guys who will make your changes in a fork that ends up costing you more long term. Big software is infrastructure which needs to be maintained but is not inherently profitable.
amenod 8y ago
> I think you can make money on Open Source > We don’t build the code ourselves. Ha, ha, well put. That much everyone agrees on, and Amazon especially so. :) The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS?
- bluesign 8y ago
  > 'Our local development houses still make money, both from development but also from SAAS.'
  - amenod 8y ago
    I stand corrected. I stopped reading after that statement, while I should have read further. Thank you for correcting me.
- funkymike 8y ago
  > The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS? Contributors to OSS are giving away their time and energy. That seems to be at the core of open source. I'm not going to demand you pay for what I produce - I'm going to give it to you for free with minimal restrictions in the belief that I will also benefit from others doing the same. It seems to me that asking how to make money by giving away one's work doesn't really make sense. If you value it highly enough to think you should be paid, then why give the work away for free in the first place. No one picks up trash from the side of the road motivated by cleaning up their community then asks how they can get paid for it after the fact. Either you are motivated to give away your time and energy; or you really want a paid job, but one where you feel like you are giving back to society more meaningfully than just helping a company make more money.
  - abdullahkhalids 8y ago
    You have completely sidestepped the most important part of the debate. There are very nice people who are doing the majority of the work to clean the street out of the goodness of their heart. Then the garbage company, who does a minority of the cleaning, is getting paid for both its work and the volunteers' work. The volunteers will be happy if either no one ever gets paid for their work, or they do. In no scenario is it acceptable that someone else gets paid for their work, especially at the level of a significant percentage of the world GDP. This is just basic human psychology - no one will ever be okay with someone else getting the recognition for their work. Nothing much to do with open source particularly.

by jaabe 8y ago

TheRealPomax 8y ago

I'm not sure that solution works when you already have a product development model that relies on (literally) tens of thousands of people none of whom trust anyone but you with stewardship of that product. Plus, given the incredible number of partners Mozilla already has, and has had in the past, it feels like the partnership idea is a passed station.

phkahler 8y ago

>> I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven open source community called OS2. We’re around 60 members, and we’ve recently won a national award for tech-reuse issued by our ministry of digitisation and around 10 interest groups. >> We don’t build the code ourselves. We do own, review and manage the code. We handle the project management and we facilitate access to our business processes and employees, but the actual development is something we buy. This sounds like you're treating the software like infrastructure, which is how I've been starting to view it. You contract out the work to maintain it just like roads. It's no surprise to me that you work for a municipality where that's how they get things done. I believe this is what the future of a lot of large software projects looks like. From the developer side people will look just like contractors and their specialization with be which OSS programs they are familiar with - i.e. how fast they can get the desired changes done and into the master branch. There will of course be cheaper guys who will make your changes in a fork that ends up costing you more long term. Big software is infrastructure which needs to be maintained but is not inherently profitable.

amenod 8y ago

> I think you can make money on Open Source > We don’t build the code ourselves. Ha, ha, well put. That much everyone agrees on, and Amazon especially so. :) The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS?

bluesign 8y ago
> 'Our local development houses still make money, both from development but also from SAAS.'
- amenod 8y ago
  I stand corrected. I stopped reading after that statement, while I should have read further. Thank you for correcting me.
funkymike 8y ago
> The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS? Contributors to OSS are giving away their time and energy. That seems to be at the core of open source. I'm not going to demand you pay for what I produce - I'm going to give it to you for free with minimal restrictions in the belief that I will also benefit from others doing the same. It seems to me that asking how to make money by giving away one's work doesn't really make sense. If you value it highly enough to think you should be paid, then why give the work away for free in the first place. No one picks up trash from the side of the road motivated by cleaning up their community then asks how they can get paid for it after the fact. Either you are motivated to give away your time and energy; or you really want a paid job, but one where you feel like you are giving back to society more meaningfully than just helping a company make more money.
- abdullahkhalids 8y ago
  You have completely sidestepped the most important part of the debate. There are very nice people who are doing the majority of the work to clean the street out of the goodness of their heart. Then the garbage company, who does a minority of the cleaning, is getting paid for both its work and the volunteers' work. The volunteers will be happy if either no one ever gets paid for their work, or they do. In no scenario is it acceptable that someone else gets paid for their work, especially at the level of a significant percentage of the world GDP. This is just basic human psychology - no one will ever be okay with someone else getting the recognition for their work. Nothing much to do with open source particularly.