| My friend said that actually only a small percentage bought support. But he was happy about that, because the user base was so large that even a small percentage made for a lucrative business. It's just a variation on give away the razor, sell the blades. Give away the music, sell the concert tickets. Open source enables reaching a much, much larger audience than would otherwise be possible, and at a much lower cost than doing advertising. (You also don't have to expend time and treasure dealing with piracy and the inevitable customer problems and anger with your DRM mechanism.) Another benefit is customers fix bugs and feed those back to you, so you've got a stronger product. Another model for making money off of open source is using it as an advertisement delivery platform. We're all familiar with that stuff. I also have a friend who expended a great deal of effort creating a very nice dev tool. He wanted to get paid for it, and made it closed source, pay only. An expensive marketing campaign is necessary to make that work (like what Coverity does), but he didn't have one. He made zero sales and was bitter about it. I don't know your particular situation, and it might be worth a try for you to go pay-only. But be prepared to invest a lot in marketing. As for the trust thing, my experience is that trusting customers works. Treat them as worthy of trust and respect, and they will respond likewise. Treat them with suspicion and DRM, and they'll live down to that expectation. |
Yes, that is the problem.
The biggest conference in my field has ~200 people. There might be 10,000 people around the world who might ever use my software in one way or another.
They tend to work in one of the one to two hundred or so companies doing drug discovery cheminformatics.
A "small percentage" of 200 is only a handful of companies. That's not enough to make a living. Rather, in that case it's more profitable to do custom software development in that case than off-the-shelf software. Because (oddly) people are willing to pay more for special one-off solutions than general solutions.
While if 10% of the field was willing to pay me once, and the handful of companies willing to pay support, then that's good money.
> "Another benefit is customers fix bugs and feed those back to you, so you've got a stronger product."
I've heard that a lot. I've also been doing free software in this field for 20 years. I've only ever received a handful of minor bug fixes.
My users are computational chemists and their IT support staff. They are not professional programmers. It's easier for them to pay me money to fix bugs than for them to do it.
Also, at some pharmas, code needs to be reviewed by the lawyers before being sent out.
I know one company that distributed source under the GPL, then found that their customers weren't willing to upgrade. Because they had made local changes, and found it too difficult to go through the lawyer review in order to send the changes upstream. It was easier for them to ask for new features instead.
> "advertising delivery platform"
Sure, and in-app sales. Except my software works on proprietary chemical compounds. I don't have access to the machines or the data, and no pharma in their right mind will allow me that sort of control of their in-house informatics platform.
> be prepared to invest a lot in marketing.
I wish to clarify that I am not looking to make my software proprietary. My argument is that I'm sure I could make more money with proprietary software than with free software.
Even if I make it proprietary, customers will get full source, no DRM, and the right to redistribute after (say), 10 years.
As for marketing, and as I found out, most people know of my software, and already use it. The problem is one of conversion less than marketing. Which is still a form of marketing, but less expensive.
> trusting customers works
So, one potential lead said they might buy my software. I gave them my list price. They said they didn't have the money to pay full price so could they get it for only $10K? This London-based organization has a full-time cheminformatics staff member, and over $100M in funding. I don't know if I should trust them, but I suspect it's a negotiating tactic.
Again, my point isn't to say that open source is a bad approach. I agree that there are business models where it does work. But it's not a panacea.