A Day in Paradise

A post on slashdot reminded me of the lack of business sense in many open source programmers.

“I’ve been working on a financial application which I’ve decided to release to the public. I want to make some money from the application, though I certainly don’t expect to become a millionaire. The problem is that I’d like nothing better than to open-source it. There are many aspects of the application that I don’t have time to refine, and other developers could definitely improve upon my work. However, I don’t know how I earn money from something once I’ve made it open source. How have you dealt with trying to turn a reasonable profit on your work while remaining open-sourced?”

Number 1: Why don’t you expect to become a millionaire? Did you sit down and decide that there was no way that your application has can sell 50,000 copies (at $20 a pop)? Do you think the financial professionals can’t afford your product? Did you think about residuals, service plans, program upgrades, additional features. When you have a good piece of software and a business plan, it’s not difficult to make a million dollars from it (especially when the dollar is as weak as it is now). If you don’t want to make a million dollars from a program, you might as well not bother.

Number 2: If you want to make money on a piece of software, you’re going to have to start building features which your clients want/need. Regardless of whether or not you enjoy programming that specific feature. Making your application open source so that someone else might come in and do all the stuff that you think is too boring is not a business plan. To make money you’re also going to need to create a website, write a manual, create marketing material, and a lot of other boring stuff.

To sum it up, with your software development attitude you aren’t going to make any money off your product, regardless of its open source nature. You might as well open source it and then put up a donations button which gets you a Latte a day (if you’re lucky).

So, is it possible to make money from open source software? Absolutely. But because I have to run in to work telling you how will have to wait

Don Dodge coined Web2.0 as “Web App + 2 Founders + 0 Revenue”. Funny, and not too far off the money.

Don goes into detail about the various ways that Web2.0 firms are funding their efforts. This goes from Freemium (free basic membership with paid premium package) to Subscriptions to simple Advertising.

One thing that he doesn’t mention is the “community-in-a-box” business model. A community in a box is not about selling any specific product, it’s simply about creating an exciting product creating a buzz around it, and then delivering eyeballs and mindshare to a larger company.

Let’s face it, despite their best efforts Netscape’s Digg clone failed miserably. Google couldn’t do nearly as good as YouTube despite of the grotesque amount of money at their disposal. Yahoo’s Image Gallery could never do what Flickr does. Nokia could have never attracted a userbase the size of Twango. And whoever pays $x Billion for flixster (or the next social media site) is not going to care about monetizing the site they are going to care about the community they are getting.

One of the main differences between this boom and the first technology boom, is that, like Dan states, Web2.0 can survive as an idea + 2 young enthusiastic founders. All we need to build a community-in-a-box is a good idea, and a couple beat up servers somewhere and a couple hours a night spent cranking out some slick PHP or Ruby code.

This interesting post describes one or the reasons why PEAR/PECL doesn’t allow (L)GPL code in the repositories

The problem that I’ve stumbled upon is that Ruby’s Gem repository is full of randomly licensed code, including lots of GPL stuff. At the very least, this information ought to be very visible so that it’s possible to weed out any GPL’ed libraries. At best, the Ruby guys would only accept MIT/BSD licensed code for the standard repository.

I am of the opinion that small snippets of code serve everyone best when released into the public domain.

This is so wrong that I have to blog about it… in this month’s Forbes magazine they have this description of Open Source in their “Network Breakthrough Innovations” section:

1991 Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds kicks off open-source movement, a sort of wiki of computer code, with a plea for contributions to Linux operating system.

That’s pretty funny…

I am finally back online on ALL my IM protocols, thanks to the newly branded pidgin client.

GAIM has always been a fantastic project, and I look forward to Pidgin following in its footsteps.

UPGRADE NOW!

I’ve always liked M.R., he’s a focused businessman whose goals line up roughly with those of the the open source community.

Yesterday linspire annouced a partnership with Canonical to use the Ubuntu OS as the new base for Linspire (a no-brainer choice as far as I am concerned), which will have the added benefit(?) of giving current Ubuntu users access to the Click n’ Run repository.

In his latest “michael’s minute” he challenged Steve Jobs to back up his latest rant against DRM by starting to distribute MP3s on iTunes Music Store. He also encouraged Apple to port iTunes to Linux and offered to do the engineering “if engineering resources were an issue”

I just discovered Songbird, which totally rocks as far as a bloated music system goes. I use foobar2000 for my daily music needs, and think directories are perfect ways to organize your files, but it does offer some nice looking features. Far better than iTunes, which I only use when I need to buy some DRM’d music of iTunes Music Store

Just a quick note to let my planetary friends that I’ve created a page that is tracking all information about my Zend Framework Hidden Gems series of articles.

More information on my Zend Framework Hidden Gems page.

I’m not going to waste blog space reiterating what is covered in the link above, but just wanted to mention that this work is being released (and will stay) under the Creative Commons license, so any comments on the articles, style or code is greatly appreciated and will be integrated back into the work (with attribution) to make this series a point of reference for those using Zend Framework.

A nice tutorial on GIT explains the development of the program, and Linux’s history.

Torvalds began working on Git as an interim solution to replace BitKeeper, which had previously been the primary source code tool in use by Linux kernel developers worldwide. Some members of the open source community felt that the BitKeeper license was not the best fit for the open source world, and thus Torvalds decided to investigate revision control systems with more permissive licenses.

Has to make you wonder what this guy was smoking, as I remember it went down quite a bit differently.

Over the next three months, BitMover intends to phase out the free BitKeeper product. Some money has been set aside to provide commercial licenses for certain kernel developers, however Linus Torvalds is not one of them. Larry suggested, “if Linus and Andrew and the others moved elsewhere, we’d glady comp them licenses”, referring to their current employment with OSDL.

But it’s good to hear that GIT is gaining momentum.