When someone hears about open or free software, one immediately thinks about money. At least, I do. “How do you make money with that,” was my first question. The answer, it seems, is not exactly straightforward. I went from being convinced that open source is not viable because it makes no money, to thinking it makes all the money, to thinking it is not supposed to make money, to thinking it’s complicated. And, that is usually the truth.

In one of his stellar articles, Ian Bicking, states that open source is not supposed to make money. At a time when I was engulfed in trying to make a career out of open source that is also sufficient for my livelihood – I was applying to Google’s Summer of Code program – that came to me as an eccentric piece. Since Bicking is a part of Mozilla, I consider his advice to be one of high importance. Bicking argues that the notion that open source software should make money because they provide some sort of utility is a utopian concept. Although I struggled with this idea, I reconciled it by realizing that open source software, in itself, does not generate money. What does generate money, though, are extra steps around it. Even though people will not pay you for your software, Bicking says, they will pay you for work that is related to it.

Interestingly, this ties in nicely with another article by Eric Raymond where he discusses business models for open source software. Now, I will not waste time mentioning those categories here, but I will comment on the parallels between Raymond’s classification and Bicking’s methods to get paid for open source software.

Reconciliation

The first example that comes to mind is consultancy. Both Bicking and Raymond think consultancy is an important business step to make money. Turns out, creating personalized solutions based on a seemingly spontaneous piece of software allows for a nice revenue stream.

Hosted services on proprietary platform is another example. Raymond calls it Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) and is essentially an open-core model where the open source software is tightly integrated with a platform which is then used to attract revenue.

Raymond also lists threatening licenses that threaten companies with freedom. In response, companies pay to buy a non-threatening license. This is very similar to Bicking’s idea on paid ad removal.

Divergence

Where Raymond sees growth and opportunity for open-source as a business opportunity, Bicking sees it as a “distraction”. What’s interesting is that Bicking considers open-source software target at people who are making software themselves: programmers. This is slightly different from Raymond’s original thesis that open-source sofware is targeted at everybody and by happenstance some of the users would be willing to contribute back. Of course, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Bicking goes on to express his disbelief about open-source’s applicability in commercial success. To me, it starts to seem like that he spirals into chaos at the end. But, then again, what do I know?