[pfranz]

I think everyone is a bit split on it. We realize how accessible and empowering open source software has made things, so there's a preference to encourage that. As a kid I was curious about Unix workstations, but knew they cost $30k and I wasn't going to get access to one unless it was a university or larger company shared with other people. Only a few years later Linux was released and today I could get a computer for less than $50 and dig through the source to my heart's content. I have access to a commercial quality Operating System, Databases, and Web Servers. All I have to do is download it.

In general the conceit seems to be paying for support and giving the source away for free (RedHat). Or selling a service and not making the source available (GitHub). It sucks because someone who writes an amazing tool still has to come up with a whole other business in order to make income from it.

There is commercial software on Linux where I don't hear people avoiding it because it's not open source: PyCharm, Sublime, Autodesk Maya, Foundry's Nuke, as well as (like you mentioned) games.

[socmag]

Thanks for putting that answer together. It's generally how I feel.

"come up with a whole other business in order to make income from it"

You really hit the nerve there.

And is not that I'm naive enough not to think that marketing function and all the rest shouldn't exist. It's just sheer frustration.

Cheers

[walterbell]

There is a goldmine of unique historical discussion on free software business models on the "Free Software Business" mailing list archives, going back to 1994. Includes industry luminaries including Cygnus/RedHat founders. Content is hard to navigate but priceless, needs to be rescued and imported into a modern mailing list archiver.

http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?ddn:0:0#b

[socmag]

Thanks!

[sjellis]

For Web applications, there's also the Wordpress model, where you publish the source code, but make money providing hosting. Ghost and Sentry are other products that do that.

There are some desktop apps where the developers do a similar thing and provide source code and perhaps unsupported installers, but you can pay for supported binaries through the Apple App Store. Collabora are trying to monetize some of their LibreOffice work that way:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/collabora-office/id918120011...

[vacri]

> It sucks because someone who writes an amazing tool still has to come up with a whole other business in order to make income from it.

However, selling the software itself means you have to engage in a robust licensing system to defeat the pirates, which is no trivial feat (even mighty Adobe went online-as-a-service because they couldn't beat the pirates).

[pfranz]

Well, I think you get around that by making a service-based company instead of a software-based company--that's completely separate from open source vs closed source. Unfortunately, not all businesses can be structured like that.