4 ms·

As a professional programmer, I'm torn between the upside of open source software (primarily that I can use it without getting budget approval and a nightmare e

by stephen 17y ago

As a professional programmer, I'm torn between the upside of open source software (primarily that I can use it without getting budget approval and a nightmare enterprise sales cycle involved) and the downside of it making it harder for programmers to make a living building software tools (although support contracts come close). I admit I'm just as guilty as the next for saying "I won't use X unless its open source" but I really do hope the 280north guys do well with Atlas. As a profession, I think it would be nice if they were able to build great tools and actually, you know, get paid for it. Case in point is Hibernate--I'm less of a fan of it than I used to be, but the insane number of projects using it for very real higher-productivity/lower-development-cost gains to me means its author, Gaven King, should be very well off right now, not just landing a nice salaried position at JBoss-now-Redhat. Co-workers and I have occasionally mused about how to help open source developers get income from their work in a non-invasive way. E.g. not having to pin your hopes on being the next SpringSource-type acquisition. Nothing ground breaking yet. Has anyone seen good approaches for this?

emmett 17y ago
The hardest part is: if Hibernate came with a license that was not completely open and free, would it ever have been adopted as the standard? Probably not. So you can't really charge developers directly. What if companies that make money using open source software created an endowment that rewarded developers who produced widely used open source software?
- stephen 17y ago
  Endowment isn't bad. But then who decides where/who the money gets paid to? Does the money go to the copyright holder (e.g. the Apache organization for anything org.apache, JBoss/Redhat for anything org.jboss) or the individual developers? If individuals, how do you partition the money, by LOC, in-project voting/ranking of team member contributions?
jerome_etienne 17y ago
what about a non-commercial use license for free, and a commercial use license for a fee ? - the software's author get money from his work and thus can go on provide good software to people - only the ones with money needs to pay - people without money get your product for free... you dont loose money as they wont buy your product anyway and they give you community and adverstissement for free. http://www.longtailvideo.com/ http://www.longtailvideo.com/ jw player seems to do well with this schema. am i missing something ?
- nrr 17y ago
  Piracy becomes a concern with this model. The one that makes the most sense, that I've seen, is pretty much what Sun is doing right now. Give the (foundation operating environment) software away for free but charge for the polished chrome and low-response technical support.
  - jerome_etienne 17y ago
    It is easy to pirate in both cases (all paid, or part free/part paid). Nevertheless in practice, companies dislikes to pirate, especialy for a prize tag as low as 20$ (for current example). It is even more obvious in this case as it is to build web applications, all those applications will have the same 280north look. So trivial to identify any piracy. selling support is nice but very hard to scale.
    - nrr 17y ago
      Well, granted, piracy's going to happen nonetheless, and it's still going to be a niggling issue no matter how you look at it. Two ways to curtail it: give the foundation parts away for free and charge what people are willing to pay for the rest. Support's easy as sin to scale. Certification programs are a good way to accomplish this; they establish a trust chain and also provide yet another revenue stream to take advantage of. Maybe your customers would rather purchase a support contract through one of your Certified Professionals® instead for one reason or another. A good use case would be because your customers feel most comfortable dealing with someone who can speak French, but you only provide support in English and German.

by stephen 17y ago

emmett 17y ago

The hardest part is: if Hibernate came with a license that was not completely open and free, would it ever have been adopted as the standard? Probably not. So you can't really charge developers directly. What if companies that make money using open source software created an endowment that rewarded developers who produced widely used open source software?

stephen 17y ago
Endowment isn't bad. But then who decides where/who the money gets paid to? Does the money go to the copyright holder (e.g. the Apache organization for anything org.apache, JBoss/Redhat for anything org.jboss) or the individual developers? If individuals, how do you partition the money, by LOC, in-project voting/ranking of team member contributions?

jerome_etienne 17y ago

what about a non-commercial use license for free, and a commercial use license for a fee ? - the software's author get money from his work and thus can go on provide good software to people - only the ones with money needs to pay - people without money get your product for free... you dont loose money as they wont buy your product anyway and they give you community and adverstissement for free. http://www.longtailvideo.com/ http://www.longtailvideo.com/ jw player seems to do well with this schema. am i missing something ?

nrr 17y ago
Piracy becomes a concern with this model. The one that makes the most sense, that I've seen, is pretty much what Sun is doing right now. Give the (foundation operating environment) software away for free but charge for the polished chrome and low-response technical support.
- jerome_etienne 17y ago
  It is easy to pirate in both cases (all paid, or part free/part paid). Nevertheless in practice, companies dislikes to pirate, especialy for a prize tag as low as 20$ (for current example). It is even more obvious in this case as it is to build web applications, all those applications will have the same 280north look. So trivial to identify any piracy. selling support is nice but very hard to scale.
  - nrr 17y ago
    Well, granted, piracy's going to happen nonetheless, and it's still going to be a niggling issue no matter how you look at it. Two ways to curtail it: give the foundation parts away for free and charge what people are willing to pay for the rest. Support's easy as sin to scale. Certification programs are a good way to accomplish this; they establish a trust chain and also provide yet another revenue stream to take advantage of. Maybe your customers would rather purchase a support contract through one of your Certified Professionals® instead for one reason or another. A good use case would be because your customers feel most comfortable dealing with someone who can speak French, but you only provide support in English and German.