> I think you can make money on Open Source
> We don’t build the code ourselves.
Ha, ha, well put. That much everyone agrees on, and Amazon especially so. :)
The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS?
> We don’t build the code ourselves.
Ha, ha, well put. That much everyone agrees on, and Amazon especially so. :)
The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS?
Contributors to OSS are giving away their time and energy. That seems to be at the core of open source. I'm not going to demand you pay for what I produce - I'm going to give it to you for free with minimal restrictions in the belief that I will also benefit from others doing the same.
It seems to me that asking how to make money by giving away one's work doesn't really make sense. If you value it highly enough to think you should be paid, then why give the work away for free in the first place. No one picks up trash from the side of the road motivated by cleaning up their community then asks how they can get paid for it after the fact. Either you are motivated to give away your time and energy; or you really want a paid job, but one where you feel like you are giving back to society more meaningfully than just helping a company make more money.
The volunteers will be happy if either no one ever gets paid for their work, or they do. In no scenario is it acceptable that someone else gets paid for their work, especially at the level of a significant percentage of the world GDP. This is just basic human psychology - no one will ever be okay with someone else getting the recognition for their work. Nothing much to do with open source particularly.
It’s OSS, but no one is contributing to it for free because it’s also pretty boring stuff like handling a employee/manager vacation acceptance flow.
We didn’t go with OSS to get free development though, we went with it because it gives us ownership and transparency.
I’m sure the model doesn’t work for everything, but I’d argue that it does work for anything related to the public sector.