| My problem with this is the assertion that failure == not making a profit. For the OP, yes, if your goal is to make money off your code then writing free software is pretty prone to failure on that front. Free software is philanthropy. Even if you somehow are getting paid to write it, it cannot be done for profit. If your objective is revenue discarding the burgeoning international IP regime as a source of income is foolhardy. That being said, software for profit is hugely contrary to software that is used. Its infinitely harder to see anyone else use your code and you must always be cognizant that your proprietary for sale code is always going to see orders of magnitude less utility and adoption than free code. So when you write software from day one the objective is going to be to either maximize money or maximize utility. They are contrary to one another. Some would argue that making money == ability to do more work == more utility but no amount of time invested into software used by a few will compare to less software being used by orders of magnitude more people. And there is also no guarantee of success. Its why proprietary, popular software exists. Making a proprietary or free product does not guarantee money or use. But depending on which you want going for one will hugely limit your ability to obtain the other. This axis also comes up in free software itself between permissive vs restrictive licensing. If your code is MIT / BSD / Apache / etc you will almost certainly never make money from it. Anyone can just use it however they want with no restrictions and will do so. It will maximize its utilization with no regard for the ethics or objectives of said use. If you license it restrictively, IE GPL or CC-SA, you will reduce your potential adoption audience to not include those that want to distribute it in propriety without providing their users the same freedoms they got from you. This can, however, be the same exchange of utility vs money, or, more often, time. Infectious free software propagates slowly but does cause the general amount of freeness to increase through permeation. It also lets you sell licenses for proprietary use and is one of the only major ways to monetize free software consistently, see Qt. |