I'm available for open source projects.

[Brad BARCLAY]

So you can make money on your very first copy sold. At that point that user
must be able to get the source form you and has the right to give it to
whoever they want. Everyone else can get for free from them instead of
paying you. How do you make any money on it.

Who ever said that the only way to make money off software was to sell
the final product?

I know of none that make money off the development itself. Some make money
on consultancy or by packaging a bunch of software or by adding non-GPL
extensions. Please give examples that contradict this.

There are projects out there that make money through "donations" geared
towards promoting the quick implementation of a certain feature that is
needed. Many organizations would prefer that such additions are made to
the core project, as opposed to having to maintain a fork of their own.
Han Reiser (of ReiserFS fame) touched upon this in his interview with
/. a few months ago:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/18/1516239&mode=thread&tid=156

Honestly, I'm not party to what most Open Source projects make or don't
make. But if you want to be so narrow in your concept of "commercially
viable" that only money made strictly for development effort counts,
this is one way to do it, and one example of a group that has indeed
done it.

With my Open Source project (the jSyncManager --
http://www.jsyncmanager.org), we've had a few preliminary offers from
some companies to pay us to speed up the implementation of one of the
features we have scheduled for a future release (v3.1 -- we'll be
releasing v3.0 final in a few weeks).

As I stepped into this late and don't know what the OP meant, I don't care
if this was his definition. It is my defintion and that was my point that
developing open software is not commercially viable as a money making
enterprise. That is not to say that money cannot be made in connection with
open source software, but just not for the development. And there can be
non-monetary benefits, for example IBM gets benefit from Eclipse being open
source, but not directly monetary.

My appologies if I assumed you had read the whole thread, and knew what
you were replying to.

I don't see how it is for developers.

I pointed it out above. And you yourself pointed out support and
consulting services. As I said, the licenses are still "commercially
viable" -- they don't prevent any sort of commercial use of the source
code (just how such an entity can use the code). How money is made off
of it is moot -- you seem to want to narrow the definition to just "pure
development" which, as I pointed out above, you can make money off.

I am not anti-open source and I use and believe in open source, but I think
we need to be realisitic and not spread false information.

I'm not stating that people are going to make it rich by working on an
Open Source project. Then again, most people aren't going to be able to
support themselves off of aa close-source project of their own either.
9 out of 10 business ventures fail in their first year -- Open Source
projects are no different.

But just because it's difficult sometimes to make money off Open Source
projects doesn't mean it's impossible, and doesn't make the _license_
used by those projects not "commecially viable".

Brad BARCLAY

 

[Bent C Dalager]

I doubt it. They only make money on consulting. They do not and cannot make
money on the software itself. And someone else besides the developers could
offer consulting services and the developers get nothing.

The major reason it is them and not someone else who is making all
that money on consulting is exactly because they wrote the software.
If someone else wants to compete, they will need to produce software
that is as good or better to gain the credibility they need to pull in
the consulting jobs.

Selling a piece of software isn't the only way to profit from it.

Cheers
Bent D

 

[Dale King]

The major reason it is them and not someone else who is making all
that money on consulting is exactly because they wrote the software.
If someone else wants to compete, they will need to produce software
that is as good or better to gain the credibility they need to pull in
the consulting jobs.

No they don't. They don't need to produce any software to get the
consultancy job. The developers have an edge on getting the consultancy
jobs, but have no exclusive right to consultancy. Someone else can open a
consultant shop and perhaps do better than the original programmers. They
original programmers have to compete on how well they do consultancy not on
how good of a program they created. And the better program that they create
actually lowers the demand for consultancy.

Selling a piece of software isn't the only way to profit from it.

Of course not. But as a developer the only way for me to make money is
selling it. Others can make money off of it or I can make money on
consulting work for the software.