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Open Source Proves Elusive as a Business Model

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mouser:
All good points.

I'm sorry if i fell into the trap of presenting this as a view of FOSS as a business model -- nothing makes me more ill than reading all of these people talking always about ways of "monetizing" the web.  That term "monetizing" makes me want to stick knives into my ears.

I don't come at this from a "business model" perspective.. I come at from the perspective of someone who would dearly wish i could just spend my time coding on projects I thought were useful without worrying the slightest about money or revenue, and did so right up until i slammed head first into the very harsh reality of having to earn enough money to pay for rent and food.

So i come at this stuff from an admittedly biased position of wanting to find a way for open source / freeware coders (and musicians and artists) to be able to find a way to support themselves, even if only just barely, while doing the work they love.  What breaks my heart is that it feels to me the open source revolution is leading once again to the big corporations getting rich off the backs of the authors/artists/workers, who must by necessity only do this work as a hobby instead of their real work, because their is no money for them to do this stuff full time.

Again, you are quite right when you say that many (most?) of the people involved in open source are doing it because they love to do it, and because at the time they are working on it, they have alternate sources of financial support -- real jobs so to speak, or they are in academia where they have free time to work on this stuff.  That's wonderful.. However I've seen enough examples of coders posting how they have to stop working on a project because they no longer have the time to work on it with their real jobs demanding their time, or how they can't afford to spend the time providing support because of the need to work at a real job. I just wish we could get to a place where there is just a little more financial support for those who would like to transition from doing this stuff as a hobby to doing this stuff full time.

This gets back in many ways to my views about donationware.  If people think of software in two categories: Commercial Software that they are happy to pay through the nose for, and Freeware/OpenSource software which they refuse to donate a dime for regardless of it's quality or value to them, then we are doomed into living with this situation where the commercial entities are the only ones who can afford to spend real time on this stuff.  If the culture shifted to donating more to open source developers, than we might see a real flourishing of coders who don't care about getting rich, and suddenly have a path that let's them focus on programming (creating music, etc.) full time.   And the result would be more high quality free (donation supported) software, and less evil-giant-corporation dominance.

Dormouse:
Most coders get into FOSS in order to do what they love on something they care about. And many are professionals who want to avoid the whole code review and approval process they live with at work. Unfortunately, one big side effect of going that route is that the code tends to get a little sloppy and exhibit some sprawl.

The same goes for the relative absence of quality documentation. Most coders HATE to write documentation - and FOSS projects are dominated by coders. So if serious documentation does get written, it's often because somebody (usually a satisfied user with a technical writing background) nominated themselves to do it and put the time in. -40hz (December 01, 2009, 04:13 PM)
--- End quote ---

I think there are a lot of issues in this topic, but the freedom of coders in FOSS (especially their own projects is one of them). Firstly, it's what provides the incentive for them to do it in the first place. But, secondly, as 40hz says, it gives the freedom not to do lots of things that have to be done on successful commercial projects: review, quality control, internal documentation, user documentation, making the product easy to use, making it pretty, support, website maintenance, responding to user requests, sustaining a long-term approach to marketing and developing the product.

Many developers are good at some of these, but very few at all. Users are mostly looking for a mostly complete package with maybe only a few areas of significant weakness. That is true for free as well as commercial products, but it is mostly the commercial entities that enforce a discipline to try to do the lot.

By and large coders take inspiration from within themselves (and seem to just want to code). The people who are just wanting to make money take inspiration from those who might pay them the money (and try to give them what they want and will pay most for, at least cost to themselves).

If you want to make enough money to live off from donations, you do have to take a commercial perspective in terms of giving customers what they want. And that is on top of having a good idea and implementing it well. And shareware authors are (nearly?) as likely not to do all the above as freeware authors.

One other thing I would mention. People like to know what the price/donation should be. They also like a discount. Trying to decide how much to donate, even if they're able to come to the point of deciding that they want to, is just too much; no-one wants to seem a skinflint, but no-one wants to overpay either.

I have vast amounts of free software. Most of it I never use, or use extremely rarely. I'm more likely to persist with software I have paid for (or donated to) and less likely to chase around all the alternatives (though there's a fair bit of commercial software I don't use as much as I expected too) - and this initial commitment is as important to freeware as it is to commercial.

mouser:
Dormouse, some very good points.
And I think after several years of being involved in DonationCoder, I can confirm your comment here:
Trying to decide how much to donate, even if they're able to come to the point of deciding that they want to, is just too much; no-one wants to seem a skinflint, but no-one wants to overpay either.
--- End quote ---

The best i've done to address this is to make a joke chart, so i haven't come up with a solution -- but i do think it bears saying that i think you are right, that this causes people no small amount of discomfort, and turns off some potential donors.

[Actually it's not quite true that there isn't another solution on DC -- having a DEFAULT DONATION AMOUNT goes a long way to ameliorating this problem, though since we hit this economic crisis, the default donation amount is mostly ignored by a wide margin].

phillfri:
Think out of the box for a moment on this one. The real driver of the internet is NOT the profit margin on web activity - its the cost of alternative means to accomplish the same levels of communication, exposure, distribution, etc. The internet is by its nature a not-for-profit model, where the goal is not defined as maximizing profits, but rather maximizing benefit for a fixed amount of grant or contribution (dollars). How does everyone think we keep increasing economic productivity on a world wide level in the middle of a recession and super high un/under-employment? Its all about maximizing certain outputs for a set amount of dollar cost. The internet  is a mechanism for doing a LOT of things a lot cheaper than doing them any other way (without the internet).

40hz:
The internet is by its nature a not-for-profit model, where the goal is not defined as maximizing profits, but rather maximizing benefit for a fixed amount of grant or contribution (dollars).
-phillfri (December 10, 2009, 04:11 PM)
--- End quote ---


I think that might have been true in the early stages of Internet deployment, but I don't think that's the case any longer. Espeically in the United states where the government has pretty much stepped out of everything except security and regulation as far as the web is concerned.

But even if that were true, it would still primarily apply only to the electronic 'plumbing' and not the content found on the web. Most content providers are actively looking for ways to charge for their words and images, and have been since the web moved out of its enthusiast/hobbyist phase several years ago.

Actually, when you get right down to it, The Internet itself isn't really a business anything. It's a communications infrastructure built around set of technologies and standards. So in many respects it is closer to what's traditionally considered to be a public utility rather than a business service. But while commercial applications were not a part of the concept that eventually became the Internet, the business community soon found uses for what it could provide. Just like it found uses for electricity back in the late 1800s.

How does everyone think we keep increasing economic productivity on a world wide level in the middle of a recession and super high un/under-employment? Its all about maximizing certain outputs for a set amount of dollar cost.
-phillfri (December 10, 2009, 04:11 PM)
--- End quote ---

Well...the most common practice currently employed to increase productivity and lower costs is to farm out manufacturing and service support to countries where labor comes cheap and there's little in the way of civil rights, environmental protection, or fair labor practices. It's also a major contributor to unemployment levels in countries that do have fair labor laws and stricter controls on environmental pollution.

And now that international shipping has become so cheap, it often costs less to ship from Asia to Europe or North America than it does to move the products from the receiving port to the local store shelves. So geographic distance is no longer a major consideration when it comes to picking a manufacturing site.

One very dirty side effect of all this web technology is that it has made exploitative outsourcing a viable business strategy. So not all is roses worldwide. None of our problems really went away. They just got palmed off on other people.

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