Open Source ?

[Sam Couter]

John Anderson <john_anderson862000 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I know this will probably be a stupid question but how
> do open source projects manage to keep going. How do
> companies like Mozilla or Samba make money to pay
> employees? Please don't think I'm having a go at open
> source I think it's a brilliant concept, but I just
> can't figure out how it all works.

There are a bunch of ways that companies make money while paying people
to release open source software. I'll list the few that I can think of
off the top of my head:

1) Support services for people who think they should be spoon-fed and
are willing to pay for it.
2) Customisation for people who can't or won't do it themselves and are
willing to pay for it.
3) Alternative licensing for people who can't or won't use the open
source licenses or aren't happy with software unless they pay for it.

Some examples:

MySQL AB releases MySQL under the GPL gratis, but will sell it under
different licences. They also charge for support services, training and
so on. http://www.mysql.com/company/index.html

NameSys releases the ReiserFS filesystem under the GPL gratis, but will
sell it under different licences. They also charge for support requests
($25 gets you one answer, as long as it takes them less than an hour to
work it out) and feature requests (quoted case-by-case or charged for
time at a fixed rate). http://www.namesys.com/support.html
-- 
Sam "Eddie" Couter  |  mailto:sam at couter.dropbear.id.au
Debian Developer    |  mailto:eddie at debian.org
                    |  jabber:sam at jabber.topic.com.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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