Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Profitability
How to make a buck? For many this is not the main concern, and altruism is a terrific thing and is a large factor in the success of open source software. However, at the same time, people want to be rewarded for their efforts and a big criticism levelled against the quality open source software can ever seek to achieve is that nobody really writes quality innovative programs for free.
The truth is developers will write quality innovative programs for free, if they are good developers and they have decided to release free software. However, not all open source software is free; it’s not uncommon to have source code released for commercial products. This means the developer is still paid for their time and work and the customer has the security of having code available for review or insurance if the developer ceases support.
Yet, even in the world of free open source software it’s not completely a deficit of funding. Firefox costs not a cent to use, to distribute, to install. However, the Mozilla organisation received the bulk of its $US 52.9m revenue in 2005 from search-engine relationships. This means the money it gets from Google advertising! That’s not bad for free software! That means those programmers can eat. It means Firefox's developers can work on the project and be paid.
Alternatively, you may market your free software as positioning you as an expert in your field. Your free software may be a vehicle for providing paid support for the product, or paid custom modifications. Well known blogging platform WordPress is free, but there’s a clear market for commercial quality themes and add-ons. Depending on your product you may even provide consulting services and business analysis to organisations. I’m in the formative stages of my own open source recruitment tool called, simply enough, OpenRecruitment and my goal is to release the app completely for free for anyone. Hopefully companies will seek my services as an expert in the recruitment area to help optimise other aspects of their business.
So, open source software can well begin as a hobby but it sure doesn’t mean you will always have to fit it in behind your “day job” – or that the quality of the project will necessarily suffer because everyone is working too hard on paid work to put any effort and time into it.
There’s a lot more to discuss about open source projects and we’ve still not even written a line of code. Come back on Thursday and we’ll talk about more: getting your project onto SourceForge or finding other means to distribute it and make others aware of it, the importance of an easy to use installer, finding help from others and putting together project teams, finding icon libraries and graphics, coming up with a logo and more!
David Bass
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