[ubuntu-za] Ubuntu and Mozilla, the inevitable alliance

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 2:17 PM, Hilton Gibson <hilton.gibson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Whatever strategy is taken by them, developers need to eat. So I am
> hoping that they find a sustainable financial business model for open
> source software projects in the future.
>
> Does anybody on the list have ideas on a sustainable financial
> business model for open source software projects ?

All that I know that works is providing services around the software
products. I don't think there's many people / companies that make
money from any open source software just by itself. Most large-scale
users happily pay for integration, bug fixing, new features,
documentation, etc. For small companies it's hard to start out since
employees with the right skills are often in high demand everywhere.

If you're purely looking to sustain a project and the intent is not
commercial, then it probably becomes a lot harder and you'll have to
rely on community efforts. You still have options though, there are
organisations such as NLNet (http://www.nlnet.nl/) who sponsor some
free software projects (they're one of the main sponsors of one of the
projects I'm working on at the moment). If your project is used in a
big commercial company you could probably get them to sponsor you in a
similar way that Dreamworks used to sponsor Debian.

It's different for each project, but if your project is useful and
many people use it, then there's almost certainly options available in
terms of sustainability.

-Jonathan