How Creating An Open Source Softwares Help Me To Earn Money?

[friendforever 0]

I have heard that creating the Open Source softwares help me to earn money. How it is possible? Who pays me, if I create a software and give the source code of softwares free to people to develop and distribute that software?

[rvalkass 5]

An open source piece of software has to be released under a licence permitted by the OSI. All licences, and therefore all open source software, must comply with the following statement:

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

So, open source software must itself be given away free. However, it can be included in applications and devices that are sold for a profit but the source code of any open source components must be made available.

So, how do people make money out of it? Well, selling advertising space on their websites is probably the most popular way of getting money from open source software. However, this money is usually ploughed back into either the hosting costs or development costs, and using it for personal profit is often seen as a bit wrong - it's also difficult as your advertising revenue increases with the popularity of your software, but so do your hosting and development costs, so actually making a profit is difficult. The alternative is selling support contracts for your software. That only really works if you sell to businesses and have a piece of software people really want to learn to use, or need to work perfectly 24/7. Again, costs increase as more people order support contracts and you need to hire staff, but it is more similar to a traditional business than the ad-based method.

[TheDisturbedOne 1]

Best way is to go open source, at least at first. Unless your software has some really impressive features, people may be skeptical of a new, unknown software. I'd say stay open source and rely on donations, just because I like open source stuff, but becoming closed source and a paid for software isn't that bad. You will have to watch out for nulls and warez, but you'll gain money each time somebody downloads the software.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

An alternative is to use two versions:1) Open Source with good featuresand then2) A closed source "premium" version with better featuresThis seems to be the more mainstream way of doing it these days. I'm finding more and more programs with both a free and paid version as of lately.

[TheDisturbedOne 1]

The only thing with that is people my modify and add to the free version, which may make it better than the paid version. Or they could modify the free version to have the same functionality as the paid version, unless the license prevents that.

[mahesh2k 0]

There are plenty of views on opensource. And i've seen both negative and positive sides of opensource. Opensource doesn't have to be free but it killed many business because of source-code being open. This model is not for everyone in software business. Only those who can work around this and create business model around this becomes successful and survives. I'll not talk about numbers migrating to open-source license. Take a look at this article which says why free is better. Also this is good article on free-software.

I just want to say one thing : If you like any open source project then keep it alive by donating to it. If possible, yearly or twice a year if it's actively developed. If open-source software also releases paid version with more features then support it by purchasing. Keep good projects alive by supporting it's development.

[TheDisturbedOne 1]

That "why free" software looks cool. I might try it.