[tekklloneer]

There's a ton of them. Many of them are smaller players consisting of core developers providing feature additions for money, or support contracts, or selling an "enterprise" wrapper/hosted.

scala, mail servers come to mind quickly

[davidw]

It's really difficult from a business point of view.

To have a business, you have to have something scarce to sell people - it could be simply your time, but that's difficult to scale. For most companies it's some kind of product, but open source products are inherently not scarce.

So to succeed, you have to have a source of scarcity in there somewhere, and that's not always easy, on top of the fact that no startup is ever easy.

[iamacynic]

it's bad only if that's the company you want to take to $1 billion scale.

what if you don't have hot shot VC buddies from princeton, and didn't go to stanford, and need to make $1m in cash to do your real business idea? all of a sudden doing paid features for an open source project or doing consulting sounds like a fantastic idea because that will get you to $1m, almost guaranteed (if you're generally capable)

hint: that's pretty much everyone.

[davidw]

Consulting is not a great business in a lot of ways, and 1 million is not at all easy unless you're 1) someplace where that's not a lot of money, or 2) you're famous.

I would heartily suggest avoiding it, as it's also not scalable even at a small size.

Look at the kind of stuff the 'micropreneur' guys do, like patio11's bingo thing. That was small (I agree with you there) but still something that once running, kept making money without a daily grind like consulting.

[flukus]

I dunno, IBM and the likes (sun, oracle) seems to make a fortune off consulting, to the point where they've just about removed themselves from actually making stuff.

[iamacynic]

you do it until you get the money, then do what you want.

maybe you're not getting what i'm saying because it involves investing (aka betting) your own money into something.

[davidw]

Consulting involves very little capital outlay, and is mostly just trading your own time and expertise for money.

Creating a product - even a small scale one - is much more of an investment (and a risk), because while you're building it, it earns nothing. The payoff is that it can make money while you're asleep.

[nickpeterson]

I've decided the best company is calling old people and selling them extended warranties for their Buicks.

[tekklloneer]

I know a handful of people doing this right now, and they're pulling above average developer salaries. However, they're also traveling a ton and building kick-ass resumés as well.