@rad, i mean exactly that, there has to be a business model first. Take this example, google created a great service, offered it for free. Money was not in charging for a search query, it came in a different way. Same as gmail, ubuntu, and joomla. To have a good strategy therefore is to offer the free software as a part of the process. As i said, lets talk about how we can make money from doing software and giving it out free and im sure we will have lots of open source goodies out there. @aki, i can do a joomla component free and offer it for download from my site, before you download, you have to fill in a questionnaire and give me your email, tel and cell no, if i can sell that info at ksh 100 a piece, and i get 100000 downloads a month, what / who will stop me from doing version 2, 3, . . . . Etc of the same. Moral of the story, lets brainstorm backwards, from the end, what else can we sell in order to give the software free? On 8/9/09, Rad! <conradakunga@gmail.com> wrote:
'Business model' is a bit of an amorphous term.
Look at it this way: all software (open source or not) costs money to produce. To produce quality software of any maana you must have the following
- Design/use case development/algorithm development/analysis - *Good *developers. Let me re-iterate. Good developers. These cost more than fly-by-wire types - Testers - Graphic designers (icons, layout, etc) - Documentation (source code, manuals, tutorials) - Project/Product management - Support
These must be funded. If you skimp on any of these your software is very likely to fail, and fail spectacularly. So any business, open source of otherwise, will need to come up with a way of addressing how to meet the above costs, plus day to day admin costs, and still remain profitable. With those as the costs, the money must come from one (or more) of the following
- Angel Investors - Selling the software itself - Selling miscellaneous services around the software (training,support etc)
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Areba Collins <arebacollins@gmail.com>wrote:
My 2 cents: even open source development has a business model, they dont just sell the software, but i bet you they sell something they do sell, maybe even not to you. Consider for a moment ubuntu, open bravo, sugar crm, joomla, even google. They offer stuff and services for free, but behind the scenes they have solid business models. If you ask me, reason many developers are not doing open source is because according to our teachers, open source software is software that is developed and given out free of charge instead of teaching oss as a business model. Way forward, lets talk open source software as a business.
On 8/9/09, aki <aki275@googlemail.com> wrote:
Hi Laban. Wow! This is indeed the heights of things... :-( . Incase you miss a sponser in the next few days after your mail below, pls let me know offlist and I'll see what can be done..... no promises but will try my level best.
Rgds.
-- Its Possible! http://www.itspossible.afraha.com Collins Areba Omwoyo +254 735 824872 / +254 720 516758 arebacollins[at]gmail[dot]com