Open Source Payday 129
itwbennett writes "The recent Slashdot discussion on the open source community's attitude on profits neglected an important point: 'no profits' doesn't mean 'no money.' There are plenty of open source not-for-profit organizations that take in millions of dollars in order to pursue their public-minded missions, and some pay their employees handsomely. Brian Proffitt combed through the latest publicly available financial information on 18 top FLOSS organizations to bring you the cold, hard numbers."
Electrician.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I need a new electrical socket, I may hire an electrician to put one in. I pay him some money.
Yet, the specs of the socket, the wiring, how to connect them all up are easily available and in the public domain, for free. After he's connected the socket, I can see his work, I could even copy it to add my own socket in another room.
The electrician would be paid money for what he did. He does not fit sockets out of 'love'!!
Why should Open Source software development be any different?
Does the OS community really hate RH? (Score:4, Interesting)
As long we can obtain the source code for free (as in both beer and freedom) does anyone care if someone found a way to make a profit off it?
I would much rather give a company selling FOSS related products so they could profit over someone else.
Re:Some do (Score:4, Interesting)
"You find a number of people like OSS not because it is free as in speech but because they don't want to pay for anything."
Which they have perfect right to do. *I* don't want to pay for anything, from software to Ferraris. When I pay for something is because I *have* to do it.
"were completely opposed to the idea of paying for any software."
I am basically opposed to the idea of paying for something that it is already done, payed for and that has zero replication costs too.
Paying for writing new software or servicing said software, both of them activities that have obvious production cost tagged to them, on the other hand, I find perfectly reasonable.
"How they expected developers to put food on the table I'm not sure."
I'll tell you. By doing what they are qualified to do: writing software, not distributing software of tagging artificial scarcity to something with no replication costs.
cash cows (Score:4, Interesting)
there are aspects of 'non profit' where there are no profits because the directors pay themselves such large salaries that there's (strangely!) no cash left over each year. I don't consider these non-profit at all.
eg. from TFA:
the Mozilla Foundation generated the highest compensation levels for Baker and Eich who, while receiving no direct salary from the Mozilla Foundation, were compensated $589,953 each from "reportable compensation from related organizations" and "estimated amount of other compensation from the [Mozilla Foundation] and related organizations."
"Related organizations," in this instance, is the Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that generates much of the Foundation's revenue.
With a revenue of $1,934,659, the Mozilla Foundation ranked fourth of the eighteen FLOSS-related non-profits researched for this report. But with a net cash flow loss of $1,333,815 for the 2010 fiscal year, the Mozilla Foundation was next to last on money lost for the year.
so, basically Mozilla Corp pays Mozilla Foundation cash to make stuff that the corp then sells/advocates/etc. Only the foundation sat on a net loss of $1.3m, yet the corp paid its 2 directors $1.2m..... hmm.
Now I don't mind the directors making a reasonable amount of money from the situation, we all got to eat after all, but I'd say a more reasonable remuneration would be more like $100k, not nearly 600k. And I totally disagree with directors sucking the non-profit cash-cow dry.
Re:Stop lying (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, just stop. The FLOSS community hates to pay money and thinks no one should make any money from software. All one has to do is look at comments on Slashdot to see that.
Well, I'm going to lose the moderation point that I just used, but I have to reply to this.
Dude, you can't judge the way the FLOSS community thinks because of the comments on Slashdot. First, because you will have to prove first that Slashdot is a non-biased sample of the community. Second, because normally the comments on one news entry are the reaction to that event, not a proper statement from such community.
And if you want more, here is one small piece of evidence: 9000€ collected in 3 months to fund Nepomuk [wordpress.com]. Nepomuk is one of the most hated and/or more controversial pieces of KDE 4.x. From what I read on the KDE related sites, lists, etc., many people are quite vocal in stating that they don't want Nepomuk and want to disable it, or get rid of it as a forced dependency. And still got some love in the form of money.
Oh, and remember the figures from the Humble Indie Bundle: Linux users of the bundle paid (a lot) more on average that Mac or Windows users [lifehacker.com.au].
Re:Stop lying (Score:4, Interesting)
And if you want more, here is one small piece of evidence: 9000€ collected in 3 months to fund Nepomuk
Nepomuk is a desktop framework that cost 17 million euros to develop [europa.eu]. And they raised 9000 over 3 months?! That's only 3k/mo... not even enough to hire 1 developer. And you expect that one person to maintain an entire desktop framework?!
If they can keep that up, in just 472 years they will have collected enough to pay for the initial development costs.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Electrician.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Most open source developers will do this. If you want a feature, we'll quite happily give you a quote for implementing it. I usually work on a fixed price, so I estimate how long it will take, multiply that by my daily rate, and will do it for that amount. Even if projects don't advertise it, a mail to the list saying 'I want this feature, what will it cost' will usually get some replies...
Consider my ignorance of the fact a hint that maybe you guys should advertise it a bit. Think of all the people who are not taking advantage of something they otherwise would had they known it exists.