How do Open-Source Products make money?

[KC Dash]

How do products like Firefox, OpenOffice.org, MySQL, VLC Media Player, etc., etc. make money with their software? They all are continually building on their platforms and updating along the way, without a clear source of income to pay for it.

How do they monetize being an open-source software? How can you make open-source fastlane?

 

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[Nick]

Most of them are non profits, they live through donations and people that support them -- similar to wikipedia. Because of their open source nature and non profit status, they get a lot of volunteers that work for free and update their software, and etc.. so they are not paying development costs and salaries out of their own pocket, like a big software corporation would do.

 

[dnice]

For Firefox it is my understanding they make money whenever people conduct a search through the Firefox browser search. They partner with all the major search engines and amazon. Whenever you search they make money (hundreds of millions in revenue). So at least for Mozilla it is fastlane.

 

[yahdmon]

They all make money selling their product.

Just because they are Open Source does now mean they cannot sell their products and even more, be a profitable entity. How possible and/or difficult that is depends upon the product. Their are open source products in almost eveny thing these days from phones to computers, household items and more.

Where are you trying to go?

 

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[Halffull]

There's a few ways.

1. They use their product as a marketing channel, then create other products (37Signals)
2. The offer enterprise support (redhat)
3. They offer custom enterprise solutions or complimentary products (Acquia).
4. They do anything else that having a great marketing channel allows you to do.

 

[KC Dash]

They all make money selling their product.

Just because they are Open Source does now mean they cannot sell their products and even more, be a profitable entity. How possible and/or difficult that is depends upon the product. Their are open source products in almost eveny thing these days from phones to computers, household items and more.

Where are you trying to go?

I am working on a SaaS computer app that I am not 100% sure how I want to sell it when complete. I was toying with the idea of giving it away for free and monetizing off of the free users with upsells, support, added monthly subscriptions, like others have mentioned. I would like to gather users as fast as possible at the beginning--for feedback and testing purposes, to see what direction I want to go with it.

 

[KC Dash]

There's a few ways.

1. They use their product as a marketing channel, then create other products (37Signals)
2. The offer enterprise support (redhat)
3. They offer custom enterprise solutions or complimentary products (Acquia).
4. They do anything else that having a great marketing channel allows you to do.

Either way, I like the idea of adding all of these to the business.

 

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