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Just tell me how to...
make any money with OSS?

I've been a "small" software publisher for over 25 years, paying every months all the money necessary to pay the salaries of my 40+ employees (developers, testers, packaging builders, secretary and so on), to rent our business facility and to pay its bills (electricity, phone, fax, water, taxes, etc.), to spend time, efforts and expenses to participate to expensive but valuable exhibition trade shows and in return of our efforts I have been fortunate enough to sell our main product to most of the fortune 500 companies (over 4 millions copies).

Because of our tiny size, I?ve often proposed in our deal with these major customers to put our source code into an escrow agent, just in case my company collapsed, byt never to make it public.

Now, putting our source code into an OSS licence would have give an tremendous advantage with regard to our technology to our competitors (Including IBM, MS, Symantec, etc?) and I don?t see what kind of financial advantage we could have got from such a publication.

So, Please tell me how I could have done better going within an OSS licensing way, and to make me understand your point, please give me a true financial model that would convince me to change in the future.

Kind regards from a small development corporation.
Breg Sasuk.
President.
Posted by: BregS   Posted on: 01/15/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use
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I hope Arras makes it  nucrash | 01/15/07
It would be nice if they would move to Linux/PostgreSQL though. I would not  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
Since it's open souce...  BregS | 01/15/07
Personally, I don't have a use for this softwre, but, someone might. Though  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
if you don't have use of it, why...  BregS | 01/16/07
I imagine there are better projects out there that will also run on Linux.  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
Open source is the superior model  Chad_z | 01/15/07
Just to understand your point,  BregS | 01/15/07
OSS is good in many markets  Boot_Agnostic | 01/15/07
Yes, customers will pay for open source, and they like the guarantees it  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
Very few I have seen.  No_Ax_to_Grind | 01/15/07
So, how do you explain all of the revenue for RedHat, MySQL, SleepyCat, etc  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
But none of them  BregS | 01/15/07
RedHat and MySQL are making good money. RedHat in particular has been on a  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
Same can be said for closed source companies  Richard Flude | 01/15/07
spoken like a true zealot  mdsmedia | 01/16/07
Sorry, not any developers I know.  No_Ax_to_Grind | 01/15/07
Obviously you are an unbiased sample representative of our population (nt)  CobraA1 | 01/15/07
There are a lot of very sustainable open source business models out there.  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
Please name a few models  oldsysprog | 01/16/07
It really does not matter how or where the money comes from to pay the  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
What are you afraid of No_Ax?  mdsmedia | 01/16/07
Got to be a good thing  Richard Flude | 01/15/07
Waht about low cost software?  BregS | 01/15/07
Not every case is the same. In your case, you might be able to keep part of  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
You defined open source...  Anton Philidor | 01/16/07
The average Linux programmer makes a lot more thant the average Windows  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
Unfortunately,  BregS | 01/16/07
You might be able to open source base functionality, but charge for  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
Is you software suitable?  Richard Flude | 01/15/07
Just tell me how to...  BregS | 01/15/07
Did you ever consider that if it was open source, you might be able to do  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
is it a joke?  BregS | 01/16/07
Business models? Which one?  BregS | 01/15/07
Have you ever heard of RedHat and MySQL??? They are both  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
and what do they got?  BregS | 01/16/07
So are you denying that RedHat and MySQL make good money????  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
without knowing your software...  mdsmedia | 01/16/07
Please be nice...  BregS | 01/16/07
The important points are in the last paragraphs.  Anton Philidor | 01/16/07
Unfortunately...  BregS | 01/16/07
Make a company to provide same service  Boot_Agnostic | 01/16/07
This is not only unethical...  BregS | 01/16/07

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