Re: Making money on open source, if not by selling _support_, then how?

On 2006-04-11, Marc A. Criley <mcNOSPAM@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What I've seen, and been involved in, both in my professional career
and in my own personal activities, is that often the software can be
the basis of a "family" of products. Instead of increasing the
"density" of features by adding or changing them, increase the
breadth of applicability. E.g., if your programming tool only
handles Ada, add support for C++ and Java; if your command and
control system does launch planning for a specific type of missile,
add support for other kinds, and then other types of weapons; if
your text processor handles well-structured, but non-standardized
text formats, add explicit support for XML.

That's a good point. This is another case where consumers of closed
source software get shorted. Increasing breadth in the Bill Gates
model usually means reproducing something that already exists, so the
vendor can sell something to the customer that they already have.
Consequently closed source buyers end up paying for the same
functionality many times over because the code is not shared between
the producers. The Richard Stallman (GNU) model enables developers to
focus on their small piece because the interfacing pieces are freely
available. So this matter of efficiency (not having to spend time
reinventing) promotes better quality open source software.

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