I have an idea for a new piece of software that I think will become a very hot and indespensible item. I want to develop it open source.
I wouldn’t mind profiting from it either.
In looking at an open source product such as the XMB message boards, it appears the main way they profit from their product, is through extra services such as hosting and support. They give the software away for free, but they act as a for profit support center.
I also looked at Apache. They seem to rely almost exclusively upon volunteers and donations. The only thing they seem to sell are t-shirts heh.
I know open source is the best way to make my software product a reality, but I also want to keep some options open for making a nominal income from the effort. Any ideas?
Get out and bust hump installing it for people. While you are at it, sell them a maintenance contract - for your software and for the system, too, if you have the capability.
Open source doesn’t mean you can’t sell it. Read the GPL carefully, and you’ll find that CAN sell it - you just have to give out the source with the binary. That doesn’t sit well with some folks, but it is within the license.
Sell pre-packaged box sets of the software - nice manuals and the software on a CD, but still put it out for download for free.
You are assuming open sourcing it is the only way to get your software produced. It’s not. In fact it usually results in it not being produced. (Or produced then ignored because nobody wants to do all the boring tasks required to make money with it. Like selling it.)
Check sourcefore.net. There are literally thousands of projects that went open source then were abandoned.
The best way would be to write it yourself.
If that’s not possible you can try and recruit people willing to work on it for deferred payment. (If it makes money, you get x% of the profits.) Tricky to organize, but still doable.
You could always try and interest investors in supporting it’s development. Not an easy job, but it’s been done before. Depends on how good a salesman you are.
I think you are misunderstanding Open source as well as Free Software. You can sell your software under the Open Source license (Red Hat does it!!)
Under Open Source, you put out the source code for anyone to see and modify, the condition being that any changes made to the source code should also be passed on as free. You can still sell your software, but when you do, you must also provide the source code along with it. Heres a link to help you understand the concept better.
Free software, as you can see, is much the same. The only difference is Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement, who says that they are different (thats all he says!!) .
In short, you can sell your software under the Open Source license, but you have to provide the source code as well.
As for the t-shirt part, Open Source t-shirts have a geek value, so thats a nice income stream as well. And yes, support. BIG money there.
And here’s another good article about why some companies invest heavily in developing OSS, despite the fact that it’s pretty hard to make money on something which everybody is legally allowed to ‘steal’: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html.
In the case of Apache, you need to realize that the Apache Foundation is not a for-profit entity. The companies and individuals that donate to the Foundation or contribute work to it, do so because the software is useful to them, not because they expect to make money from selling licenses. Of course, for every donor or contributor there’s a hundred guys using it for free, but that’s okay – it’s not like software is a depletable resource. And even the ‘freeloaders’ are indirectly providing value because they are testing the software and some of them will report bugs, and because they increase the market for service providers, of which a small percentage will become donors.
If you want to generate profit it is (naturally) more usual to sell the software instead of distributing it for free. If you don’t want to market it in traditional ways, you might want to consider shareware. Lots of companies do this, and many seem to make reasonable profits, too.
If you want to distribute it as open source for ideological reasons, then of course the above does not apply.
If you want to use the open source model because you can’t develop the system on your own and want to have a ‘free’ project team, again the above does not apply.
Good luck! However, don’t expect dozens of competent programmers to crawl out of the woodwork and build the program for you. Usually, most of the work on an OSS project is done by a surprisingly small core team or even a single individual. Sure, Mozilla and the Linux kernel are being worked on by hundreds of people, but they are not exactly typical.
Usually, an individual or a small group of people writes a first alpha version; it may not be very functional yet but should at least offer a basis for further incremental improvements. Once the program is in an at least semi-usable state, it is published as open source so that other people may contribute bug fixes or even new features to the project. But that small team is still going to be doing most of the work – including the programming work. As long as they do a passably good job of it, they will generally remain the de-facto owners of the project, unless they voluntarily pass the baton to someone else.
If you are not a programmer yourself, expecting others to design and build your program from scratch while you are the leader is probably not realistic. I guess you will either need to team up with one or two people who have the skills required, or just publish the idea and hope that somebody else will start an OSS project to implement it, in which case you may get credited for the idea but you won’t be leading the project.
Several people have mentioned selling your software as well as making it available for download, but that’s not required by the GPL as I understand it.
All that is required is to give the source to everyone that you give the binary to. You could easily set up a website and sell the software without giving it away for free.
Obviously, if you license it under the GPL, then there’s nothing to stop anyone else from giving it away for free, but you don’t need to deal with the hassles of doing so.
Yes, you can sell copies, but you can’t require everyone who wants a copy to buy it from you. It’ll also be easier to attract developers if they can download the source code for free.
