Re: [OT] mothers, free software

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 21:10 +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>      o One cannot make money with free software
> 
> The FSF, the OpenBSD project and RedHat are examples of the contrary.

Respectfully, this is not precise. Neither FSF nor OpenBSD are
for-profit organizations. Even a casual read of the RedHat 10Q and 10K
filings reveals that RedHat consistently *loses* money on software, and
that their revenue strategy is based on generating money through support
and upgrade agreements.

In fact, RedHat did not show a profitable year until very recently, and
it is very clear from their filings that the profit was based entirely
on support revenue. For a long time, it wasn't clear that this was going
to work, and the filings clearly identified this as the most important
investor risk for potential buyers of redhat shares.

The MySQL people have a similar model.

So yes: you can make money in this business, but not on the free
software per se.

>From a business perspective, the risk of free software is that your
competitor can use your code against you. The benefit of free software
is that your competitor cannot undercut you on price, which makes you
very very hard to dislodge from your market position unless you screw up
pretty badly.

shap