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The Linux distillery How on earth do you make a dime out of Linux and open source software?
The Linux distillery How on earth do you make a dime out of Linux and open source software? | How on earth do you make a dime out of Linux and open source software? |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 05 January 2009 | |
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The letter was occasioned by Gates’ perceived rampant pirating of his then Micro-Soft company’s version of the BASIC programming language on the Altair computer platform. The Altair was remarkable because it was the first mass-produced personal computer that was available pre-built. Prior to this, microcomputers were constructed from kits. In his letter Gates refers to the time and costs spent in developing, maintaining and documenting the product. However, he did not see the compensation coming in for this time and effort as being comparable to the amount of people actually enjoying the product. Specifically, Gates wrote: The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however. 1) Most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) the amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent of [sic] Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. If less than 10% of people using BASIC had not purchased it this means over 90% had pirated it. Interestingly, Atwood also found a comment as recently as November 12th, 2008, where the developers of independent game “World of Goo” also report their piracy level as 90%. As far as commercial software goes, little has obviously changed in the 32 intervening years from 1976 to 2008 – despite the use of unpopular copy protection mechanisms like serial keys, digital rights management (DRM) – which single-handedly gave Spore a hugely bad rap – CDs-required-in-the-drive, and so on. Atwood’s article goes on to say that one thing is crystal clear: if you write software and charge money for it, your software will be pirated. It’s as sure as death and taxes. Now, piracy is bad, okay? It hurts the programmers who depend on its sales to pay their bills and wages. Sermon over. By contrast, software piracy pure and simple isn’t an issue in the world of open source. This is a no-brainer. It’s free to use and distribute. Yet, this does raise the question: who the heck writes open source software? If they’re not paid to do it, is it any good at all? Certainly Microsoft has tried to use this argument. But is it true to say you can’t make money out of it, at all? CONTINUED |
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