Article Writing Free Software
Why do developers contribute to open source?
i’ve been reading articles and they all say that developers want to empower their software by sharing code and collaboratively writing it.. which makes some sense.. i also read that some just want to develop software to make the world better.. so i’m aware of that,
but how does a developer support himself financially?
recently, there was an open source software coordinator who decided to abandon the project because his family made fun of him for spending too much time and energy on something free.. this seems natural but why isn’t this the case with other developers?
It all comes down to licensing. Some Open Source licenses allow the developer to create and sell their software, providing they allow others access to the source code. Others state that you can’t actually sell the software, but can charge for any medium used to distribute it (charge for the actual CD, net usage, etc).
However a very common approach is to sell support for your software. As an open source dev, you’re not really required to SUPPORT (ie fix bugs, answer questions, help with installation, etc) your software. Many companies that are successful in this area actually sell support to large companies (although most still are nice enough to do patches and other enhancements to the general community without charge). Red Hat is a large company that does this and has been doing so for a long time (since ’93 with 2009 revenues of more than $652.57 million).
The main “spirit” behind open source is that you’re writing the software for the love of programming and the love of spreading knowledge to others. In fact there are some that continually lose money to support it, Mark Shuttleworth (a millionare from Africa) started a very popular version of Linux called Ubuntu. His company sells support services, however the company has yet to actually make any sort of profit and Mark has been funneling money to keep it afloat. He doesn’t do this expecting immediate profits, but mostly because he likes giving back to open source (however I’m sure he hopes that one day his company will be profitable by providing support services).
In short you don’t necessarily go into open source to only make a profit, but also because you want to give something to the community.
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