Do you know any examples of successful usage of GPL in business?
Seeking an example of building business on writing GPL software.
I have tried to google model for making money from open source.
There several models for making money from open source that is already written listened,
and some models for making money from writing open source software.
However it seems that it is easier to get money from existing open source than from your own (written by yourself).
There are methods to get money for developer in short, that were found.
(Actually it is very hard to get opinion of person who really makes money, however there are a lot of speculations from people who got from there work for community zero, just dreaming about money from open source. Following are just opinion of people involved in different discussions in Net).
1) Banners Advertisement.
Very simple - put ads on your web-site. Users who have no direct goal when visiting your site, that hosts the software. Very old and easy model. One issue: Why software than?
It seems that it is better to write about housekeeping and Britney new friend, and have much more stupid visitors that have no exact goal (to download your software in the case).
2) Support.
Write software, and somebody will pay you to describe how to work with it and keep it working on servers. Examples of companies : RedHat, JBoss. However, RedHat doesn't write software. RedHat just integrates modules in distro and provide support. Actually it sells risks, due to QoS statement.
JBoss was GPL project, and was bought by Sun. Actually I don't know who got money, and are all code contributors were payed.
MySQL and TrollTech examples, actually represent dual-licensing models (free for free development, and payed for commercial). This case is of:
3rd) Use free version as advertisement and as testing platform for your non-free version.
4) Develop free for one platform (actually testing), and got support from hardware vendors for another platforms. This is example of Linux kernel.
The tool and application you developing that way have actually to represent more value for hardware vendor than other open-source projects in queue for sharing budget of the vendor for such projects.
No warranty that your effort will be payed at all.
However, from my experience (and with my estimate), if you write something that was helpful for solving your tasks, and published it in user-friendly and easy to use form, it will be used by somebody else with 95% of probability. But they will pay you with 95% of probability nothing for your effort.
5) Develop proprietary software using existing LGPL, BSD, MIT code.
And again it is not about writing the open source, and just about reusing existing for making your own NON-GPL business.
I found no example in the real world were GPL license were better that some else (don't consider dual-licensing model, it has issues like mentioned under the link).
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Are there in this world any examples of successful usage of GPL in business?
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You left out one of the most obvious ways to make money from GPL software. The way, I (and many others) do it.
Stop charging for the program, charge for labour. You write the core program, then when somebody wants a feature not there - you charge them an hourly rate to write it for them.
Of course, with the GPL - anybody else could do that, but only a programmer, and since you know your own code best, nobody can do it cheaper than you.
This creates a kind of distributed finance model for advanced software, each customer only pays for his own feature, but everybody gets the benefit (I charge a LOT more if you don't want me to GPL your feature - and I highly discourage this). So you gain from other peoples financial contributions, as they gain from yours, and you ultimately gain much more than you contribute.
It's really simple, beautiful and powerful. Of course a proprietary program could charge for new features - but they can't offer the 'share in the results' benefit in my second paragraph. That is a unique feature that a developer can only offer with FOSS. Such features often make the difference between the customer choosing your product or the competition. The fact that it IS free, that it doesn't have recurring license fees, that if you die another programmer can keep it going - those things just make it even more attractive.
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