Making Money With Linux (Was: Help on Ubuntu advocacy)

[Ante Karamatić]

On Sun, 2005-06-26 at 02:30 -0500, Jacob Walch wrote:

> I've heard that there are shareware programmers that have hardly made a cent.  These
> are people who are actually asking for payment.  It's sad that those who give so much
> without even a wimper about not getting paid, in many cases, aren't getting paid.
> I could say much more, but I'll just leave it at this for now.

<irony>
And to end it: This Ad was payed by GiveMeMoney Ltd.
</irony>

Who told you that opensource programers aren't paid? You know that part
of Ubuntu maintainers (majority of those in main repository) are
acctually, paid? RedHat maintainers are paid. SuSE maintainers are paid.
These are organisations that do make money and do pay their
developers/maintainers. Yes, not all of them create new apps, but they
provide patches and fixes for apps they work on. They send that patches
to other maintainers/developers (who are or aren't payed by some other
company). That's what opensource is.

For example, you have one developer starting project X just because he
needs that app. X evolves in something that author likes and mosty,
developing stales. There are few fixes, patches, etc... Then comes
distributions like Ubuntu, likes that program, but misses some feauters.
Payed developers bring this feauters to that app, and send patches to
upstream, making their changes available to others. RedHat maintainers
pick up that, add some things too, and send upstream again. Hey, they
maybe even employ original author. You see, it's unbreakable cicrle.

You can, of course, setup whole buisness around X, if it's that good.
So, you have, for example, typo3.org, open source colaboration, and
typo3.com, company that builds around typo3. You have Fedora as a
OpenSource playground, and you have RedHat, as a company product based
on Fedora. Money can be made on lots of ways, not only seling product.

Have you ever worked in IT? You know, for example, selling products
isn't the biggest income. Selling solutions, support is that what makes
money.

For example, how much can you charge someone for instaling his Linux and
setting up LDAP on it? Not much. But how much can you charge for monthly
support? Let's say, support lasts for 24 months. Charge them only 1000$
per month. That's 24000$ in two years on only one solution. And you have
many solutions like that. Give 2000$ back to LDAP and distribution you
use, and you will feel good.

-- 
Ante Karamatic|--|ivoks(@)grad.hr|--|PGP: D3BDA225
http://master.grad.hr/~ivoks/|--|ICQ: 64631782
May, 15. <herve> we're fixing the universe, it's not an easy duty!