| The consumer market for GNU/Linux desktop application is tough, although there are some niche markets that can be viable. Wikipedia has a list of proprietary GNU/Linux applications that provides several examples[0]. If you want to charge in the consumer market and aren't interested in game development, solving boring, but relatively complicated problems (e.g. tax software) seems like a good bet financially. Open source developers are less likely to sustainably work on boring applications. People that generally prefer free software are also more likely to set aside their principles if you can somehow lessen some kind of significant pain for them (again, like doing taxes). The business market is much more viable. There all sorts of viable markets, like: - compatibility glue for either server-side or client-side open source alternatives to the Microsoft stack that solves certain headaches (e.g. arcane file formats, better conversion for scripted Excel sheets), - GUI (system) management tools (such as CPanel and Plesk for budget webhosting, but for less saturated markets like managing thin-clients or virtual machines that are still a moving target), - hardware + software (e.g. building things like portable barcode scanners for inventory management, security/surveillance hardware or VoIP boxes using the Raspberry Pi), - et cetera. If you target business users open source or dual licensing becomes much more viable too. It isn't economical for most companies to dedicate a lot of resources to IT internally, so they will still pay for e.g. support, training or a managed version of your application. The latter is especially attractive with web applications, of course, because you can sell a managed SaaS version of your application (this is exactly my business model with http://www.vixu.com [1]). 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proprietary_software_fo... 1: Based on an Apache licensed application you can find at https://github.com/fmw/vix). |