• Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed To Make Money
  • By Ian Bicking
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
  • Translator: kasheemlew
  • Proofread by: Long Xiong, Jack Tang

Or: The best way to do something is to at least try

We all know: there’s no way to make money in open source. Is that true?

I came up with this idea because Mozilla is looking to diversify revenue over the next few years, but there are constraints because everything we do is open source.

There are already dozens (hundreds?) Successful open source project teams have attempted to transform themselves into small commercial enterprises, some of them very seriously, but the results have been disappointing.

I myself am currently trying to commercialize Mozilla (” trying “if you plan but don’t do it), and the question often comes up in the feedback I get: Can we sell open source stuff?

There’s no evidence that we can (or can’t), but I can say this: It’s hard to sell something that isn’t meant to make money.

We see open source as a poison to commercial products. Yes, it’s hard to force someone to pay for such a product because of open source licenses, but there are many successful business cases that don’t force anyone.

I find this more difficult with an implicit assumption: anything that works must make money. It’s an unspoken moral expectation, like the Just-world hypothesis: there will always be some money to be made by something that is practical, helps people, is needed around the world and is good for others. There should be a chance that something like this will become a day job that will earn you money and pay off for all the hard work you put into it.

We think the world should be like this, but it’s not. You can’t make a living doing music or art. You can’t even take care of your kids for a living. I think this is the basis of a lot of criticism of capitalism today: there are too many important, necessary things that enrich us more than anything profitable, but are not economically sustainable.

I won’t try to change that in this article, but remember: Not all good things make money.

But we know there is money to be made in software, and a lot of it! Do you make money from closed source? Can OpenSSL make money if it is closed source? Can it make money if it charges for licensing? Probably not. The license doesn’t matter, it’s just not packaged like a moneymaker anymore. It’s not enough to just address the important issues.

So how can you make money?

  1. Users are willing to pay for an application; But not much, just a little. Growth requires markets and capital, both of which are hard to find in open source projects (I suspect some of them wouldn’t know how to do it even if they had the capital).
  2. Advertising always makes good money. Unfortunately, this may offend some people who will remove the ads from your open source software and then repackage it. As a form of price discrimination (e.g., removing paid ads), I think you can avoid losing users.
  3. Fully hosted services: Automattic’s WordPress.com is a good example. How’s Ghost doing? These are complete solutions: you don’t get one piece of software, you get an entire website.
  4. Users will pay if you can guarantee them a personalized solution. That is consulting. In the case of software, that is consultingware. Although often vilified, many businesses are actually built on this, and I think Drupal is one of them.
  5. People will pay for your focus and constant effort. In other words: an employee’s day job. It would be unfair to include this in this list, but it would be logical for consultingware. And as a dominant model of open source, I think it is worth affirming.
  6. Anything paired with a physical device. People value things based on both hardware and software experiences.
  7. I’m not sure if Firefox makes money (directly) from advertising, or as compensation for maintaining their monopoly.

I must have left out some interesting ideas.

But if you have a business idea that you think might work, what does open source have to do with it? Don’t we know: Focus on your business! Focus on your customers! Software licenses can be a distraction, even if software is a concern, but it’s not business related. Maybe that’s why you can’t make money from open source: it’s a crooked road. The question is not open source versus patents, but open source versus business-centric ideas.

Look at it another way: Who are you going to sell to? Traditional open source software that scratches its own itch is built by programmers for programmers, and it’s been very successful, but it’s selling to users who don’t want to pay. They just want to use the software to increase their personal productivity (which is smart, because programmers get paid more). Can we sell open source software to other people? Can others use the source code?

Therefore, I am pessimistic about the commercial success of open source, but also somewhat discouraged: there is a lot of open source software besides commercial products. For all its success, the mission of free software has stalled: what people actually use isn’t free and open, and that’s a shame.

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