Charging Support
Raymond did see that if programmers relinquish creative control of their work and gave the sources for free, then they would be challenged by the problem of how to monetise their work.The Cathedral and the Bazaarsuggests that open source programmers make money by selling support. The model is to achieve mind-share (i.e. market dominance and general acceptance) by giving away code as open source and then use that market as a platform to offer services and support.Red Hat Linux is offered as a poster child of this approach. Red Hat, for those who do not know it, is a company that specializes in selling the operating system Linux, to people running servers that cater for many users (e.g. a web server supporting many sites). Red Hat’s market is server administration and its penetration into the desktop market remains very small. It is precisely because Linux is complex, demanding and sometimes quirky that There exists a market for Red Hat to administer it at the server end. Programmers can sell services to businesses if what they produce is sufficiently complex or difficult that people cannot use it easily. But even so, despite being launched on the wave of the dot com book, after its quarter century, the Linux provider Red Hat was still 1 / 60 th of the size of Microsoft and was recently bought out by IBM.But if the product is highly useful, easy to use, intuitive, reliable and well documented, then giving it away as open source is commercial suicide because there is little or no market value for services: the market value is in the product. And here is the irony, because software that is useful, easy to use, intuitive, reliable and well documented isprecisely the paradigm of what software should be. Good software is properly documented, does not break and does not require hand-holding to use it.John Gruber made the same point.(************************************** (**************************************Talented programmers who work long full-time hours crafting software need to be paid. That means selling software. Remember the old open source magic formula – that one could make money giving away software by selling “Services and support”? That hasn’t happened – in terms of producing well-designed end user software – and it’s no wonder why. In Raymond’s own words, the goal is “software that works so well, and is so discoverable to even novice Users, that they don’t have to read documentation or spend time and mental effort to learn about it. “[quote from Eric S. Raymond].It’s pretty hard to sell “services and support ”for software that fits that bill. The model that actually works is selling the software itself. This is politically distasteful to open source zealots, but it’s true – and it explains the poor state of usability in open source software.(************************************** (**************************************(********************************** Ronco Spray-On Usability (This was again written in 2004. Here we are in (*************************************************************************************************************.(************************************** (**************************************The current business model is recipe for failure. That’s the conclusion of Peter Levine, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that backed Facebook, Skype, Twitter and Box as startups ….. Levine says the conventional open source business model is flawed: Open source companies that charge for maintenance, support, warranties and indemnities for an application or operating system that is available for free simply can’t generate enough revenue.(************************************** (************************************************************************** (Why the Open Source Business Model is a Failure,Consequently the standard open source economic model does not favor good, easy-to-use, well-documented software as popularly claimed. What it does favor is technically complex software that needs support or buggy software that gets dropped if the developer loses interest and is not paid. The fact that an old article from (is still relevant inand today is an indictment of the inability of the open source movement to progress past Raymond’s original idea.Forks and AbandonwareMost open source is barely usable and empirical inspection of Github will show that to be true. Open source users will admit that a lot of open source is buggy abandonware. However they argue that this really does not matter since some small significant fraction is really quite good and That’s the stuff we should use. Hence the argument is’ Yes; a lot of open source is awful but that’s not important because you don’t have to use it. ‘However the problem is that the open source user may not stumble on this magical fraction and the invisible iceberg of buggy, ill-conceived open source lies submerged ready to rip out the bottom of your leisure time and send that lazy weekend to the bottom. In fact, open source uses massive amounts of user time trawling through defunct and buggy applications and posting to forums in search of patches and bugfixes. open source zealots tend to be blind to this. They treat the sunk costs of their learning through hard experience as zero, which is wrong. The cost of having to deal with software which should never have been issued is significant – even if you finally junk it. Bad software will injure your leisure time and your pocket.But above all this is the sheer waste of human effort in terms of the production of rotting software in repositories. Github, as anybody who has toured it knows, is a graveyard for software projects, many duplicating the efforts of each other. Many of these projects died of FDD. It certainly wasn’t supposed to be like that. Eric .S. Raymond envisaged that open source would liberate programmers from the toil of reproducing each others work because code would be shared.(************************************** (**************************************Imagine no longer having to spend your internal staff’s time and salaries on rewriting, testing, and distributing new binaries for each new kernel as it comes out. You certainly have better things to do with all that skill.(************************************** (**************************************(**************************************************************************** (The Cathedral and the Bazaar p) ********************************************************************************************************************************
**********But anybody who has kept pace with the history of Linux (and particularly the sad story of their audio systems) knows that this is
exactly what goes on in Linux. Linux is beset by forks and reduplication of effort beyond that which any reputable closed source company would find acceptable.
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