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There Is No Money In Free Software. PERIOD!!
Is this true? Do people need to be pushed into paying? Could there be some other reasons, here to fore unexplored, that are the possible causes of what may be perceived as lack luster support? Could a flawed (donation) support model be the main bottleneck in the flow of support dollars?
The Disenfranchised:
Consider for a moment typical individuals who's sensibilities are such that they very much want to support each and every person and project that had a hand in building their favorite FOSS distribution. They can go to their favorite distributions home page. Pay the suggested 10, 20 or so dollars and be happy, they did their part. They contributed. But that doesn't cure that knot in their stomachs. The knot, I believe, many of us have been feeling since our first introduction to free software, but just can't get a handle on. What about those people and projects that wrote the underlying code, the foundational core of the distro? Those unglamorous library builder/maintainers etc.., who are disenfranchised by their obscurity.
The FOSS distribution builder/maintainers don't divide up the money they're given and pay these obscure projects anything. Commercial GNU/Linux distributions don't either. They do give back to the community by directly supporting some choice projects that will later help them to increase their market share by using the resulting code (In fairness, this does in fact help to advance the entire community). But, the small, obscure, application and foundational core programmers are still left wanting. For me, and hopefully for all of you, this is "Unacceptable"! If no money is collected, that's fine. Some people simply don't have money to give. But if money is collected for a distribution or project, justice and fairness dictates that these collected monies be shared in some way with all who were involved. Not just to the people who did the final assembly of all the code sources into a completed usable packaged Distribution.
We'll do it ourselves:
Under the current support model, what do individuals with these sensibilities do? They set out on their own to remedy this injustice of course. They find a list of all of the 1000 plus packages used in their favorite distro. Find all of their home pages, reasoning to themselves that they will contribute to each one separately. That's the only thing that will truly clear their consciences. Wait a minute! Have any of you done the math yet? What is the actual cost of doing the right thing and a clear conscience?
Time: Huge amounts of my time would have to be dedicated to finding, surfing to, and conducting a separate payment transaction at these 1000 plus websites.
Cost: The transaction fees alone could add up to far more than what would be a reasonable, even generous, amount to pay for the whole distribution. If each individual paid one dollar, one time, at each packages website, that's 1000 plus dollars. Not counting any transaction fees.
Unacceptable Payment Options: All of you who need, and are asking the community for financial support. You will dry up and turn to dust before some people, who very much want to support you, will ever use Pay Pal, or give their credit card information to any website. Let alone 1000 plus websites. It shouldn't be a great, shocking revelation to you, that Patriots, Privacy Advocates, and other Freedom loving malcontents are drawn to GNU/Linux. The staggering number of anonymous post on GNU/Linux news sites should tell you that. These people are chasing what is left of the privacy that freedom cannot exist without (Freedom Cannot And Will Not Outlive Privacy). Malcontents are the non-coder core of the GNU/Linux community. If they weren't in fact malcontented, they would save themselves a lot of time and aggravation by staying with Microsoft and Windows. The concept of privacy however, is something that the Microsoft agenda has long since abandoned in their quest to appoint themselves the gate keepers of totally tracked and locked down computing. This leaves Free Software as the only acceptable alternative. Very much worth supporting with our dollars, and fighting for with our votes and our time. |
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Comments (7)
going about it all wrong
let me state that very very few software companies ever make more than marginal money. There are only a dozen or so, and they all rely on the monopoly principle and the forced upgrade to be successful in selling software. If M$ were to start loosing it's monopoly position, say only 50% of the market, most of those companies would probably be out of business a year or two later. Software is really only profitable when there is a high majority ownership model. Most software companies make money from service.
Money is made in FOSS, it can and is done by many people and distributions. What many of these people who are making this argument seem to consistently fail to understand is that money is not the root of a capital society, barter is. And in this sense if one contributes a little money here or there, helps other people with a problem, provide patches, writes new programs, or documentation, or gets involved in any way they are giving something back. Payment in kind is a way many people around the world live.
I do something for you, you do something for me. Both are happy and both get something they need. Many small projects are more successful when they ask for something specific in return (such as a bigger Hard Disk Drive).
Let me give a little example from the real world.
I was attempting to set up a firewall for a friend and was having a few difficulties with Fedora as the base. I know a guy who works locally and a 10 min call and a few follow ups put me on the right track (I'm a user first you understand). The guy was more than happy with the maple syrup he received from me which was the deal, he loves it in his coffee but it is a bit expensive to justify such extravagant use. But you ask 'where did I get the maple syrup from?', Well I got that in return for working wood for the winter pile for a friend, who makes the stuff. This is the stuff my and many other peoples lives are made of. I may make my money from one company, but I don't rely on the wage packet for everything in my life.
The market potentially encompasses every mathematics or computer software major who takes a theory of computability class. Gee whiz, what a huge market, and boy do those individuals have a lot of disposable income.
The piece missing here: cost of a transaction, which includes finding a seller (or buyer), negotiating a price, and exchanging goods for money or goods for other goods.
eBay lowers transaction costs in some markets as an example of that, as does money itself - you don't have to hunt around for someone who has a good you need that needs the good you have.
Sometimes, the cost of the transaction just comes out too high, and you might as well give away the good you possess, especially when "giving it away" means sending a very-low-cost-copy.
No money in concrete either...
We are talking about a commodity here and in the commodities in the software world are the operating system, compilers/interpreters, basic libraries, utilities and productivity applications. If you want to make money (as opposed to simply solving your own problems using the available Open Source commodities) you need to look higher up the stack at applications that people need and have not yet gotten frustrated to the point of developing themselves.
Open Source is generally about solving your own problems and a by-product of that process solves the similar problem for others. If you want to make money using Open Source, you have to be focused on solving other people's problems in a way that is easier and cheaper than they can do it for themselves. It's called business, people, and its hard. The vast majority of businesses started each year fail inside of two years; open source or not.
No one is going to give you anything, you need to find someone willing to pay, work for it and submit a bill for the value you provide. What you are describing in the article as "an acceptable way to equitably share the support dollars it gets with everyone" is called communism and, frankly, that is not what Open Source is about.
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