No money in concrete either...
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| Author | Content |
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| DaGoodBoy Oct 15, 2004 5:33 AM EDT |
...because cement, sand, lime and gravel are basically laying around on the ground. You can make money combining the ingredients and delivering them to the market or you can make money building something out of concrete like houses, buildings or sculpture. Putting a paypal button on the website for sand or gravel is not ever going to generate a lot of money. And since anyone can become a distributor or can start making something out of the inexpensive available concrete for resell, the value is moving from the basic ingredients to a few layers up the stack to what people find useful. It doesn't mean that people don't value the sand, it just means that one kind of sand is equivalent to any other kind of sand for the purpose of making concrete. We are talking about a commodity here and in the commodities in the software world are the operating system, compilers/interpreters, basic libraries, utilities and productivity applications. If you want to make money (as opposed to simply solving your own problems using the available Open Source commodities) you need to look higher up the stack at applications that people need and have not yet gotten frustrated to the point of developing themselves. Open Source is generally about solving your own problems and a by-product of that process solves the similar problem for others. If you want to make money using Open Source, you have to be focused on solving other people's problems in a way that is easier and cheaper than they can do it for themselves. It's called business, people, and its hard. The vast majority of businesses started each year fail inside of two years; open source or not. No one is going to give you anything, you need to find someone willing to pay, work for it and submit a bill for the value you provide. What you are describing in the article as "an acceptable way to equitably share the support dollars it gets with everyone" is called communism and, frankly, that is not what Open Source is about. |
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