Making a Living Building Open Source Software? 66
asimbaig asks: "When I started my IT Staffing and Placement firm last year, I couldn't find a decent Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or an Open Source alternative. I then found SugarCRM, and was blown away by its power and ease of use. Partly frustrated with the existing vendors and partly inspired by SugarCRM, I decided to write that ATS using LAMP. 6 months and 45k lines of code later, I have just released the preview of industry's first Open Source ATS/HR Management system, called CATS. Now, it will be an interesting experiment to see if I can actually make a living out of it and move away from my IT staffing business. SugarCRM seems to be doing well, so why not?. Is anyone out there making a living from writing Open Source code?"
Sorta. (Score:2)
Re:Sorta. (Score:2)
(Wow, even a pun in there. Unintentional.)
Yes, sort of. (Score:4, Insightful)
a) start a successful business b) make money off open source
I know a few people that work for WindRiver, Apple, Adaptec, etc that make money off open source; I also know a few people that have actually started their own businesses and are making money.
Can't say I know anybody in both groups....
Good luck, hope you have good credit.
Re:Yes, sort of. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes, sort of. (Score:3, Interesting)
sendmail (Score:4, Informative)
I can see it work (Score:2)
As an example I can see a profitable service doing phone installation and configuration, maintenece with Asterisk, you supply the knowledge for setup and expansion and be there for the customer when problems occur. Given such a complex system (even for proprietary like Cisco) businesses are going to be paying for support subscriptions, except the software costs/
Business plan (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Spam Slashdot
3. ???
4. Profit
Your challenge will be attracting HR people who purchase stuff like this.
Problems:
- Your average personnel administrator doesn't know jack about open source
- IT staff who care about something being open-source drive those sorts of purchases at many companies.
Re:Business plan (Score:2)
Re:License (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Earn Money Fast!! (Score:1)
Re:Earn Money Fast!! (Score:1)
remember where your money comes from (Score:5, Insightful)
So where's the money come from? That's what everyone's trying to figure out. The subscription model is one, selling support licenses is another. I'm trying to find a way to sell complete systems, so the value isn't so much in the software but in the labor put into building a complete open source system. There are as many ways to try and hack this as there are open source programmers.
Re:remember where your money comes from (Score:5, Insightful)
Give back as many electrons as they give you. (Score:2)
If you found some way of keeping the electrons, your house would begin emitting sparks as the static electricity increased. Anyone who tried to ring your doorbell would be electrocuted. Not a way have friends.
The power company sells you electron pressure, not electrons.
Donations (Score:1)
I wish someone would tell me how well it pays..
Re:Donations (Score:4, Informative)
Over the last year the project has received maybe $300 between cd sales and donations. Out of my pocket for servers and other expenses in running the project (not counting time) I have spent about $2000.
I am sure once we have a more stable release dontations will improve and I dont blame people for not donating to an unstable project, but even with a stable project I dont think donations is any kind of a way to make a profit. At best it helps offset the money you spend to keep your project going.
For the Love of God, why.... (Score:3, Insightful)
ones would have been sufficient... it's not like there aren't 900000 gazillion
to pick from.
Business Plan? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you telling me you just spent a lot of time building a piece of software, which you've already licensed, and you've decided now is the time to come up with a business plan? That is pretty backwards, in my opinion.
There are a number of business plans for selling software and even a number of them for making money from Open Source Software:
Plan number one, sell licenses to closed source software. I think you've already missed this one and it has the disadvantage that it can't compete against an open source product in the long run.
Plan number two, get a company or conglomerate of companies to agree to pay you to develop and support a cheaper, better, more customizable alternative to their existing software. I think you missed this one two, if you already made the code public.
Plan number three, release code for free and try to get companies to adopt it and pay you for support and customization. This is probably your best bet at this point. You need to find out what current companies charge for support and what they charge for their software and meet or beat their prices; or, you need to provide significantly more functionality. You need to get some good sales guys and give them the advantages of your product over other products. Main advantages you hold include the fact that it is open and thus they can migrate to other systems and that you or they can customize it to meet their needs. Find out what their current software doesn't do that they would like and make yours do it, just for them. Emphasize the personal service as part of a support contract that is semi-annually renewed or whatever. This is your revenue. Drawbacks to this include that the better your software gets, the less likely they are to need support and they can always go with their own IT dept. or with a competitor for support. You have the edge in that you know it better than anyone and are someone external to blame/call.
Plan number four, release the product for free and promote it. Beg for donations from big companies that adopt it and other benefactors. If it becomes popular your reputation will be worth a lot to you for speaking engagements and other contract work.
Best of luck.
An insightful post! (Score:3, Interesting)
-Rick
Re:Business Plan? (Score:1)
Fourth option: Ghostscript model (Score:3, Insightful)
* The current release is available under the AFPL which allows pretty much any personal use but limits commercial use (particularly as part of a product) to licensees who've dealt with Artifex. I looked into this at a past job; the cost wasn't worth it for what we were doing but could be worthwhile for larger-distribution products.
* The previous major release is available under the GPL, with its attendant permissions and restrictions.
So, you might be able
Re:Business Plan? (Score:2)
As Keynes reminded us, in the long run, we are all dead.
Closed Source continues to be competitive and profitable in many markets. Microsoft's earnings were up 5% in the last quarter to $3.65 billion USD.
Re:Business Plan? (Score:1)
Re:Business Plan? (Score:2)
Selling software under a license/per-copy model makes a lot more sense.
He already GPL'd the software. Didn't you read the first two parts of my post?
Re:Business Plan? (Score:1)
Lucky 8 ball says... (Score:2)
Dual licensing model (Score:2, Insightful)
Where's the source? (Score:1)
Re:Where's the source? (Score:1)
Call me a paranoid security guy but... (Score:2)
-Rick
FLAWS: (Score:2)
2) Search functionality only allows searching on name
3) Key skills is a flat text field, a table with skills and years exp would be nice
-Rick
About making money: (Score:3, Insightful)
About making money: If you can convince businessmen that you are 100% trustworthy, you can make money by providing your software as a service and charging a small amount each month. Business people do not like running their own servers.
Re:I'm applying to be editor. (Score:1)
Re:Funny. (Score:2, Informative)
Follow Big Blue (Score:4, Interesting)
You have the basic elements for a business already in place. The current problem is making all the pieces fit together. Balancing the components will be an ongoing task.
You seem to have:
Assuming that all these factors are true, it would seem to follow that using a service model may be the best use of your time. The staffing part of your business is the best place to finesse your design, introduce this service to your clients (perhaps as a web enabled application/service) and to discern where the best revenue stream lies.
The only other bit of advice is to see where your energy levels peak. If you like the mix of all these activities then you're in the right place. If however parts of the efforts are draining and irksome then that should be cause for reflection.
Any business will take more then you expect, but if you're enjoying it, it's a blessing.
If not, it would just get more and more draining every day.
it's been done before, it can be done again (Score:1)
another way to make money on OSS (Score:1)
Give away the software, sell the services (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not for the faint hearted; my job window is always just a couple of months out but doesn't seem to be drying up either. And you need to be a triple threat: able to code, and to teach and mentor
Even so, my wife has to work (mostly to get health insurance for us).
I love the freedom, especially from PHBs
OT: Health insurance (Score:2)
When it becomes necessary, check out catastrophic (high deductible) health insurance. The cost is a fraction of full coverage, there's very little paperwork, and the cost difference between catastrophic and full coverage is sometimes more than the deductible! If you do have a lot of routine expenses you can tax shelter those costs with a HSA (Health Savings Account). A competent insurance agent should be able to help you out.
That's not the way things usually develop (Score:3, Interesting)
For businesses that make a living from selling support (SugarCRM, RedHat etc.), the path is a different one.
First, you create the project. You keep updating it and improving it, until it forms a community. You keep mentioning that you also offer commercial support for the project, but until it has a community of early adopters, no one will pay you to support it.
If you manage to cross that sea, however, there is good money in FOSS. RedHat make all their money by selling support for the product after they managed to turn it into a standard. MySQL argueably do the same (they also try to sell licenses, which is something I'm not sure I agree with). SugarCRM are doing the same, though they did annoy the "community" enough to create a split. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that.
The thing to understand here is that you have a very long road ahead of you yet, before you can actually quit your day job for this.
Personally, I moved into the "sell services, base them on FOSS" business. Some of the FOSS involved was written by us [sourceforge.net], but we never sell the actual software, always the service behind it [lingnu.com].
Shachar
Selling features (Score:1)
Hopefully paying you to implement feature X will be cheaper for them compared to buying a commercial solution that already has X.
It might even be possible to provide some infrastructure so various companies together can raise funding for a feature X they mutually want.
Variations (Score:1)
I do (Score:2)
I write OS code for money. People hire me to develop software for a variety of purposes all related to the automotive industry, and it pays quite well. You'd think the customer would later just take my code and make changes themselves, but they usually just call upon me to do it for extra cash, because they realize that despite the fact that my code is written well and readable, it would take longer and thus cost more to get someone to find their way around it, especially because most of my code is wri
Ugh (Score:2)
I agree though it has a lot of user functionality.
There's a lesson here somewhere. It's important in the early stages of a product to pay attention to user needs, otherwise you don't get the momentum you need. From an geek early adopter pov, having access to source code, even bad source code, covers a multitude of sins. It'd be very expensive to bootstrap a proprietary product that was this ambitious.
Not exactly a living but... (Score:1)
http://www.librelogiciel.com/software/PyKota/spon
assurance (Score:2)
You might be willing to make free updates available for your software, but you're not required to do so. You could quit any day. You could take down the project web site any day. You could ignore a security bug for a long time because it only affects a small segment of your users so you figure it can wait. You can document lightly or not at all.
These are all your prerogatives in a hobby project.
Enter the
Outlook integration (Score:1)
Making money from Open Source can be hard (Score:1)
I think one of the keys is to be realistic about what you're selling. So many times you need to ask yourself 'Would I pay this amount for this service?'.
I've just started writing some tutorials [creativetutes.com] around using free software for creative design, and while I do expect to make some money (v. small) from advertising, I don't think I'll be able se