Date: Sat, 16 May 1998 20:06:16 -0400 (EDT) From: CyberPeasant <djv@bedford.net> To: andy@fastnet.co.uk Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Profit? Message-ID: <199805170006.UAA29340@lucy.bedford.net> In-Reply-To: <199805161445.PAA22724@ns0.fast.net.uk> from "andy@fastnet.co.uk" at "May 16, 98 03:45:33 pm"
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andy@fastnet.co.uk wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have a simmple question, how do you make any money if the product
> is free?
Think of the OS as a taxicab. If I gave you a free taxicab, could
you make money with it? Sure. There are taxicab drivers (users),
taxicab mechanics (consultants, custom programmers), people who
write books about taxicabs, taxicab junkyards, manufacturers of
add-on goods, driver-training instructors, the entire taxicab
garaging-industry, and so on.
Because they're such swell taxicabs, some of the people who make money
or have fun with them volunteer to design and make new models.
Some of the big taxicab fleets pay the salaries of the volunteers,
or allow their "mechanics" to work on new taxis one day a week.
(Lots of device drivers (like ethernet) were done this way.)
Probably the single largest profitable use of BSD is called - ta-da -
the internet.
Lots of folks make a living involving FreeBSD and other free software
in some way. (I used to work for a very profit-hungry "defense bandit";
but the software I wrote was often available to people at large. When
we were doing something proprietary, we were verrrry careful about
contract wording and gov't money.)
A lot of freeware (BSD,for example), was written on contract for
big money; the client or funding agency (often a govt or non-profit
institution, like U.C. Berkeley, the FSF...) pay handsome salaries
(or stingy graduate fellowships) to the developers, and then release
the results to the community at large. Lots and lots of engineering
software was developed this way. (Like SPICE, Nastrans, and so on).
The X Window System was done with big-bux from a consortium of corporations
who wanted the results, and wanted the results shared for sound
business reasons.
An awful lot of freeware of merit is produced for graduate theses.
Dude X gets his degree, we get a virtual memory system or whatever.
Free software is a sort of free-will socialism, or a non-market
economic activity. The Red Cross is non-profit, too.
Dave
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