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Re: "As software grows up" .. what do you do?

by moritz (Cardinal)
on May 08, 2012 at 07:30 UTC ( [id://969388]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to "As software grows up" .. what do you do?

The solution to the “first adopter,” now left behind is not to be in denial. Sounds simple, eh? It's hard. You have to admit that you're not the best. That you've made mistakes. It's a skill best learned young. It's what you need to make rational choices. There's site devoted to such issues which I've found quite interesting.

Open source, free apps is well known too. There are lots of companies that make profit from open source software and the ecosystem around it. Red Hat has a revenue of > 1 billion USD, and their main product is open source. The provide training, certification and support. They also sell licenses, though I'm not sure how exactly it works (maybe that have some non-free programs in their portfolio, or they sell different licenses to those who don't like GPL).

Github seems to do fine with providing mostly free service, and charging for private repositories.

I think the key is to provide substantial additional value in the paid version, so that people see a good reason to buy it. And then don't charge just one dollar.

And one must realize that not all open source programs can be monetarized. You simply cannot sell alarm clock apps for smartphones, there are just too many free ones floating around, and there's a limit to how much better you can do.

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Re^2: "As software grows up" .. what do you do?
by sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on May 08, 2012 at 16:36 UTC

    Red Hat is an interesting scenario:   they immediately took on Linux to the corporate market, sold support-subscriptions at a reasonable cost but (except for a brief complimentary period) never free-of-charge.   They also had a very successful IPO (thank ye!!) and they bankrolled all that cash instead of spending it on riotous living, or so I am told.   (And so did I ... ;-) )

    Nevertheless, the core problem for the second-example company definitely is revenue.   And I suspect that a great many (Perl and otherwise) consultancies and support-providers might well be feeling that pinch in a different form.   Having software out there in the market is nothing but a great big sucking sound unless it can be tied, and kept tied, to a dependable revenue stream source.   Red Hat certainly did that from the get-go, and that good plan was in their original pre-IPO strategy document, but they also operate at a fairly big economy of scale and with deep pockets.   I am not sure that even they could have started with one business-proposition and switched to another.

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