Guest Posted November 4, 2005 Posted November 4, 2005 Hi, I'm going to be speaking at the up and coming SCALE Open Source conference in February, 2006. As the owner of a company which greatly depends on and supports Open Source programs like osCommerce I need to bring up a question that is often asked about where companies make their money from the development of OS programs. The question I, and many others, have is really directed to the original developers of an OS application. Where do you make your money? As a small design and development business we make much of our money through the design and support of new themes and installations of programs like osCommerce and phpWebSite. I built and run www.phpWSforums.com, to support the phpWebSite community. Many articles discuss that the developers of OS applications make their money primarily through support. Is this still true? I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this topic, as it comes up quite a bit in my classes and at conferences when discussing Open Source programs. While I have a number of answers to this question, I'd love to hear from this OS community to broaden the explanation of how the core developers make their money writing such great and FREE programs. Thanks! --Kevin
MarcoZorro Posted November 4, 2005 Posted November 4, 2005 Where do you make your money? Money can be made by an opensource project in a number of ways. 1. Sponsorship 2. Mechandise such as cd's / books / tshirts etc 3. Custom programming / support 4. Government grants
cannuck1964 Posted November 5, 2005 Posted November 5, 2005 Well as a developer, I would say that many people make their money primarily through customization work. Sponsorship helps, but if left to just that, developers would all have to move to a country with a lower average wage earning..... While osC is given away for free (being GPL), the base model of the cart system is not designed to meet every businesses needs. As such, specific customizations are usually needed, many of these are given away for free here in the form of contributions, but these contributions will not met all business needs, so they would need to be further customized. As a developer, the primary role is development, from the GPL project, which in my opinion, is really just a showcase for the developers skills, to customization work for specific project needs. While you may never get paid for the GPL project development, the exposure that it will bring, usually compensates the developer, by allowing them to show off their skills, leading to additional paid work. I love to code and design new features. I think, dream and work on many different coding requirements all of the time. For me it is not just the money, but also a love of my work and the freedom to create new things/functionalities. A developer may not make a lot (remember the starving Artist) but then if you have a passion for your work, you will both survive and even prosper when you have built up a name for your work... cheers, Peter M. Peter McGrath ----------------------------- See my Profile (click here) for more information and to contact me for professional osCommerce support that includes SEO development, custom development and security implementation
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