{"id":24,"date":"2008-02-03T19:36:14","date_gmt":"2008-02-04T00:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/2008\/02\/03\/whether-to-make-money-with-open-source\/"},"modified":"2012-12-05T00:57:37","modified_gmt":"2012-12-05T05:57:37","slug":"whether-to-make-money-with-open-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/2008\/02\/03\/whether-to-make-money-with-open-source\/","title":{"rendered":"Whether to make money with software"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many years I have been asking free software fanatics – how will you make money if your software will be taken (legaly) for free by your competitors? Sadly the best answer I ever got was “you’ll make money from support and other services”. Which is good when you can get it; but you can sell support and services for proprietary software just as well – so by open sourcing your software you, as a business, don’t have anything to gain and have somethiing (perhaps a lot) to lose. (There are a handful of exceptions, but I’m talking about the majority in the market today.)<\/p>\n

Earlier I finished watching Steal This Film II<\/a>. It was actually a lot better than I expected. I expected a bunch of propaganda about how the MPAA is suing 12-year-old girls. It’s far from being balanced, they don’t even bother talking about how today’s industry is supposed to deal with it but they kept hammering on this point – it is the way it is, you can’t do a damned thing about it.<\/p>\n

Now, I am not well known for this, but I do pay attention when someone has something worthwhile to say. And it suddenly dawned on me: if people don’t pay for music, movies, or software these days, a discussion about whether it’s moral, ethical, or legal belongs in academia. It doesn’t really matter whether copying software for free on a large scale is the right thing to do. What matters is that there is no demand in the market for software priced so that the creator gets a return on investment.<\/p>\n

This is rather ground-shattering for me. I always believed that in capitalism one who makes a good product deserves (both morally and legally) to get a reward. As opposed to communism, where one does as much as he can and gets as much as he needs.<\/p>\n

Though my understanding of capitalism hasn’t changed, I realised that there is a strong factor affecting the marketability of software that isn’t written in any book I’ve read and isn’t talked about very much. That is – if people can steal it without getting caught, they will.<\/p>\n

What conclusion to draw from this? I could do many. But since I’m a pessimist, I will temporarily give up on writing general-purpose applications. Things may change in the long run and maybe not. But for now, for better or worse, it’s not financially feasible. Luckily for me, I still have options in my career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many years I have been asking free software fanatics – how will you make money if your software will be taken (legaly) for free by your competitors? Sadly the best answer I ever got was “you’ll make money from support and other services”. Which is good when you can get it; but you can … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-andrew","4":"post-24","6":"format-standard","7":"category-opensource","8":"category-safeforseneca"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":671,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}