Ruby Editor

R

Robert Dober

There are other business models than the governmentally enforced
artificial scarcity model where software is treated as physical product
units.

This is a very important point you are making here, I feel however
that it is not simple for businesses to adapt to that and that the
government enforced models (even here in Eurpoe :() seem much more
reassuring -- everything is done to this fin.

So I think it is important to say that but it is not the businesses
which are to "blame" -- at least not all.
Furthermore -- and that hurts a lot -- we have to accept other POV
even if we think that they come from manipulation, the "Let me save
you" attitude is Freedom's greatest enemy.

I just wanted to add this Chad, what you said here and before is very
good stuff, please do not take this as criticism.

Cheers
Robert
 
A

Alex Young

Michael said:
I don't know about Apache, but I think you'll find that most of
Mozilla's income comes from referral fees from Google. Apparently it's
on the order of many tens of millions each year.
Well, there's another business model, then :)
 
J

John Joyce

Well, there's another business model, then :)
MySQL does also sell commercial licenses required under certain
circumstances.
But you still failed to answer for the source of income of the
independent developer.
Model breaks.
 
R

Robert Dober

MySQL does also sell commercial licenses required under certain
circumstances.
But you still failed to answer for the source of income of the
independent developer.
Service, training, development of required features, which remain open
Source but are paid by somebody who really wants the feature, this all
pays better than development, maybe somebody can dig up some lines
about this because I would not take my word as granted either;).
But these are the base lines
Model breaks.
Please ask questions about breaks on a HW mailing list or is this
about modeling breaks in Ruby ;)

Robert
 
R

Robert Dober

oops too much French

last_post.gsub!("lines","links")
last_post << "sorry".upcase

Robert
 
A

Alex Young

John said:
MySQL does also sell commercial licenses required under certain
circumstances.
That would be the point, yes. Open source software that's funded and
supported by purchases of commercial support contracts.
But you still failed to answer for the source of income of the
independent developer.
Model breaks.
No it doesn't. I wasn't talking about independent developers
specifically, but what reason is there that MySQL's business model
couldn't scale down?

Besides, it doesn't really matter if you don't like this particular open
source business model. There are plenty of others.
 
M

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

Michael said:
I don't know about Apache, but I think you'll find that most of
Mozilla's income comes from referral fees from Google. Apparently it's
on the order of many tens of millions each year.

cheers,
mick
OK ... where does *Google's* money come from? The searches are free, and
most of their other "products" are as well.
 
S

SonOfLilit

OK ... where does *Google's* money come from? The searches are free, and
most of their other "products" are as well.

Most of google's profits are from advertising, AFAIK.


Aur
 
B

bgulian

Thanks for the examples. Could I ask some questions or comment about
about each one?
For example, free the software,
charge for service. It seems to work for (at least) Red Hat and MySQL.

How long did it take these two companies to get off some sort of
patronage and start making money?
Then there are companies like Neuros
(http://www.neurosaudio.com/) who use open software to sell hardware.

Yes, this is a traditional model for hardware companies, even before
the advent of OSS. It may make companies like Digidesign rethink their
model.
Then you've got bigger companies (like IBM) who see the benefit of
expanding the market or promoting an open standard on top of which they
then sell a closed-source product.
You could argue that Apple have partially done this with OS X and the
tools that are distributed with it, but that relationship is more
tenuous.

You could even argue that Microsoft with it's open source Ajax
Foundation Library is using this model. I'd be hard pressed to call
these three companies open source.

Still, let's say I've got this great little editor called TextBuddy I
want to get off the ground. How do any of these models, including the
kickbacks from Google mentioned later in this thread apply to me?

Bob
 
M

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

Alex said:
I wasn't talking about independent developers
specifically, but what reason is there that MySQL's business model
couldn't scale down?
Lots of reasons ... look up "barriers to entry" in any MBA textbook.
Besides, it doesn't really matter if you don't like this particular open
source business model. There are plenty of others.
There are plenty of business models. There are many fewer *profitable*
business models, and almost all of them require that a product or
service *exist* and outrank its competitors on important *non-price*
differentiators of quality as perceived by customers.

MySQL is a good example ... many database gurus would tell you that it's
technically lame relative to Oracle, SQL Server/Sybase, DB2, Informix
and PostgreSQL. But both as an open source project and a business it is
thriving.

Red Hat is another good example of a thriving open source business
model. However, in the case of RHEL, I would argue that it *is*
technologically superior to its competition, with the possible exception
of Solaris. There just isn't another server OS out there that runs on
commodity hardware with that level of security, reliability and performance.

Bringing this back to Ruby, I'd say there's another good example of a
thriving open source business model walking this very forum -- Sun's
jRuby project, and for that matter, the underlying JVM. Remember, I'm
one of those folks who think virtual machines are the tools of Satan and
that *real* language implementers don't need them for either portability
or performance. :)
 
A

Alex Young

Thanks for the examples. Could I ask some questions or comment about
about each one?


How long did it take these two companies to get off some sort of
patronage and start making money?
http://www.red-hat.com/about/companyprofile/history/
No idea about MySQL at all.
Yes, this is a traditional model for hardware companies, even before
the advent of OSS. It may make companies like Digidesign rethink their
model.


You could even argue that Microsoft with it's open source Ajax
Foundation Library is using this model. I'd be hard pressed to call
these three companies open source.
No, but they do follow business plans that heavily involve open source
development. At least, Apple and IBM do. MS have a very long
barge-pole for not touching the GPL with stored somewhere in Nevada.
Still, let's say I've got this great little editor called TextBuddy I
want to get off the ground. How do any of these models, including the
kickbacks from Google mentioned later in this thread apply to me?
Find a business type that will support it. If your editor can support
it, it may be worth various businesses' money to have custom file format
readers built, for example. Alternatively, find something that *you*
can do better than anyone else because you've got your editor (and it's
especially good at whatever specific thing you designed it for), set
yourself up in the marketplace doing that, and *then* release it once
you're secure, possibly keeping to yourself the little bit of extra code
that makes what you're doing special. Near as I can tell, that's
exactly what 37signals did.

To bo honest, text editors are always going to be really hard, because
the free incumbents are so damn good (and, let's not forget,
well-entrenched).
 
A

Alex Young

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky said:
Lots of reasons ... look up "barriers to entry" in any MBA textbook.
Not entirely sure I understand. What barriers do you mean?
There are plenty of business models. There are many fewer *profitable*
business models, and almost all of them require that a product or
service *exist* and outrank its competitors on important *non-price*
differentiators of quality as perceived by customers.
Yup. One place that open source projects tend to outrank closed source
ones is in the user community (yes, I know that there are
counterexamples in both directions, and also examples where that's
completely irrelevant).
 
C

Chad Perrin

Lots of reasons ... look up "barriers to entry" in any MBA textbook.

Without making a case for specific barriers to entry that apply in the
case of MySQL's business model, you're not actually making a point.
Throwing economics terms around without any context for applicability
does not constitute evidence for an argument. For instance, "barriers to
entry" applies to anyone entering any market, including small to medium
firms like MySQL, individual developers trying to sell individual pieces
of software like TextMate, open source software support firms, huge
hardware companies that are more well known for the software side of
things, and so on. It doesn't matter what your business model is, how
big your company is, or what the legal situation is -- there will always
be barriers to entry. The point where all three of those things come
into play is in determining *what* barriers to entry apply, and how
insurmountable they are.

There are plenty of business models. There are many fewer *profitable*
business models, and almost all of them require that a product or
service *exist* and outrank its competitors on important *non-price*
differentiators of quality as perceived by customers.

All attempts to enter a market require some initial investment (barring
pathological exceptions). It's actually easier (read: "cheaper" in terms
of invested resources) to build recognition and desirability for a piece
of software when its source is open than when it's closed. In the open
source case, you can just toss it out in the wild and see if it picks up
enough steam to provide you with some opportunity for generating revenue
(whether it involves direct support, feature commissions like RMS
provides for GNU Emacs, secondary advertising revenue, or something
else); in the closed source case you have to find some way to convince
people to give it a try without opening the source to them, which
significantly limits your potential audience even if you initially give
it away, but leaves you opportunity to develop a per-unit retail revenue
stream.

People seem to have some strange impression that open source development
means no revenue streams -- but what it really means is that *different*
revenue streams are available to you. You can either follow in the
footsteps of people who have already developed some of those revenue
models, or you can pioneer a new one if you're clever enough and
potentially reap huge rewards. The differing development models result
in differing opportunities. Thinking there aren't any opportunities
demonstrates a lack of imagination, not a lack of opportunities.

Red Hat is another good example of a thriving open source business
model. However, in the case of RHEL, I would argue that it *is*
technologically superior to its competition, with the possible exception
of Solaris. There just isn't another server OS out there that runs on
commodity hardware with that level of security, reliability and performance.

Well . . . there is, but I don't think you're counting other possible
examples in your comparison (like the BSD Unix variants). I'll just
assume you're lumping all Linux distributions together when you say RHEL,
and not excluding other distributions like Debian and Slackware.
 
C

Chad Perrin

OK ... where does *Google's* money come from? The searches are free, and
most of their other "products" are as well.

Advertising revenue, I believe . . . which leads to another revenue
stream available to open source software. In fact, that provides a
business model (almost?) unique to open source software, since making
money entirely off advertising while giving away downloadable software is
a lot more viable as a business model with open source software than with
closed source software.
 
C

Chad Perrin

How long did it take these two companies to get off some sort of
patronage and start making money?

I'm not sure, and it's really not relevant to the point. The point is
that there's a viable business model here -- and, in fact, because the
revenue needs of a smaller project are less than those of a larger
business like Red Hat and MySQL, you could probably become profitable
somewhat more quickly as an individual developer than trying to leap
immediately into something the current size of Red Hat.

Still, let's say I've got this great little editor called TextBuddy I
want to get off the ground. How do any of these models, including the
kickbacks from Google mentioned later in this thread apply to me?

As already pointed out, there's not as much opportunity for filling a
need with a text editor as with some other software types. TextMate was
an exception because of the relatively new opportunity provided by MacOS
X as a user environment (something like Vim doesn't really blend well
with that environment, at least yet). In any case, anything other than
the idea of using software to sell hardware, *all* of those revenue
models apply to your example.

For instance, Richard Stallman survived for years primarily on revenue
generated through feature requests for Emacs. I'm sure that's at least
part of the reason that Emacs is almost a credible OS replacement. All
it's really missing is its own HAL and bootloader (it relies on those of
the host OS instead). Ha ha, only serious.
 
H

Hassan Schroeder

What ever happened to the browser that Sun used to ship with Java as a
demo? Is that still around? I liked that one.

HotJava. Yeah, it was nice, but was never developed beyond support
for HTML 3.2, and no, it's no longer around.

A shame it wasn't open-sourced at the point of abandonment...
 
J

John Joyce

The translation of all this is "barrier to entry" = 1 man can not do
it and make much very easily.
1 man can not normally fund the team of attorneys to enforce
licensing. gPL or otherwise.

point 2:
Nobody is saying all or nothing! Not everything needs to be or even
should be open sourced. That's just crazy absolutism for no reason.

Many people are indeed making a living with open source, but for the
truly independent developer, it is not always a viable option.

It's not a black and white issue about all software. You write it,
you do what you will with it!
 
M

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

Chad said:
Well . . . there is, but I don't think you're counting other possible
examples in your comparison (like the BSD Unix variants). I'll just
assume you're lumping all Linux distributions together when you say RHEL,
and not excluding other distributions like Debian and Slackware.

Well ...

1. I've heard good things about BSD, but it's really hard to find
sysadmins for it. It may be more stable than any Linux kernel, but if
you can't find someone to maintain it, it's not going to be useful.

2. No I was *not* lumping all Linux distros together -- I *was*
excluding Debian and Slackware. They aren't as hard to find sysadmins
for as BSD, but they are enough different from Red Hat that there's
still a learning curve. I *meant* Red Hat!

3. I'm surprised nobody defended Windows Server 2003. Just because it's
closed source and expensive doesn't mean it's a bad OS in terms of
reliability, security or performance. Apache, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL,
Ruby, Rails, etc. run just fine on Windows 2003 server
 
T

Todd Benson

3. I'm surprised nobody defended Windows Server 2003. Just because it's
closed source and expensive doesn't mean it's a bad OS in terms of
reliability, security or performance. Apache, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL,
Ruby, Rails, etc. run just fine on Windows 2003 server

I'm not sure why -- maybe a change in OS philosophy on my part -- but
I think Windows 2000 server was a Microsoft high watermark for
stability/reliability/useability in my opinion. We had plenty of
those guys sitting around with nary a problem.

Licensing wasn't too much of a hassle, either. At least they weren't
doing things like some of the engineering software brands we ran did;
namely, more often than not, requiring serial and/or parallel port
dongles on _servers_ of all places! Talk about grabbin' ya by the
'nads.

I'm a minimilast, so I run with BSD and vim. BSD is a bit weird in
the OSS world. They put a sturdier cap on the open source zeal
present in most linux distros.

I think it was the writer Neal Stephenson that attempted to compare
OS's to vehicles. Well, if his Linux is a tank, the former BeOS a
batmobile, Windows a Saturn, then I guess BSD would be like a
locomotive -- sturdy, but you have to follow the track.

Todd
 

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