So, as part of my work for my group, I did a bit of looking into open-source business models and profitability of open-source in general, and I found a couple interesting articles
The first, a page from the GNU website concerns selling free software.
The key concept in it is that the idea of "free" in open-source software isn't that you're giving it away at no cost. Sure you can do that, and a lot of people do, but that's not the point. The point is, once you have it, you have it. You are free to do what you want with it, with the restriction that what you do with it is also free in that same sense. This expands the number of people who can contribute to an idea massively. The idea you put out there could be taken in an entirely new direction once someone gets their hands on it. Great for the idea, but how's a company going to make money off of an investment like this? Should we even be considering that?
Well, you can charge for your distrobution, and if people think it's a fair price they'll get it. But it gives them some control. A person who wants to try it can get the full copy from a friend, maybe decide to pay later. A group can get one copy and share it. There's degrees of "pay" built into this idea of distributing, instead of the all-or-nothing you'd see with proprietary software. An interesting thought from the business perspective.
It kind of comes down to selling a service instead of a software, in a lot of ways. There's more of that in another article I found, but that'll be for a later blog post.
Anyways, link
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