LCA 2011: One way of making a living from FOSS

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 27 January 2011 08:03

Opinion and Analysis

How do you make money from software when you give away the source? That's a good question - which these days has as many answers as the number who have found a business model that permits them to live off what they code.

Toowomba's Andrew Eddie (pic below), the lead developer for the Joomla! content management system, is one of those who makes a living from free and open source software.

He provided some insight into his methods at the 12th Australian national Linux conference yesterday, in a presentation titled "The paradox of commercially viable open source software."

Eddie has been writing open source software since 2002, first with the Mambo project and later with Joomla!

(Disclaimer: iTWire uses Joomla!, along with some extensions, to run this website.)

In 2007, the project started to promote the fact that it was under the GPL. Some might call it enforcement. The result was that some members of the project walked out.

Until that point, the project had not been too particular about the licensing requirements when it came to extensions. But once the GPL was put front and centre, the tale was different.

Eddie said that it was not possible to do what people with traditional licensing did, things like digital rights management or using obscurity to hide intellectual property.

"When you use copyleft, distribution is free and some licences, like the GPL, have viral downstream effects," he added. Hence, alternative models had to be devised.