I’m debating with myself on whether I should release the Kiosk Browser as open source software (probably on sourceforge.net) or whether I should hold off and possibly try to make some money off of it.
What do you think?
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14 Comments
MONEY!!!
Could you really make some money off of it. Or are you just going to charge the Bridge?
Why not just do both because no one that buys software looks to sourceforge.
I posted that on my phone. And the CSS came through.
Anyways, I think you should definitely sell it but your roots are with open source so as I said above you should do both. Maybe just give the first release to sourceforge, or just give the source. You can always open it up and make sure other people don’t distribute it.
If not, sell it for $15 a license, and do a network check to make sure people don’t install one license on more then one computer; you will make bank.
I can’t wait to install it at the Bridge.
Aren’t they the same thing.
Depends on your point of view
I’ll share my thoughts so far on the decision…
1. Regardless of the decision on whether or not to make it open source, there are definitely certain cases where it would be “free” in the no monetary cost sense, such as the use that originally inspired me to develop it (Bridge Kiosk)
2. If my aim was to make the application as secure as it could possibly be, it would be logical to make it open source, so that others could spot any mistakes I may have made and correct them, or at least alert me to them.
3. I think that if I put the time and effort into marketing it to the right places, there may be an opportunity to make a profit out of it. And although Dan makes a good point about the possibility of doing both, I think there would at least be some impact on the sales by having an open source version available.
4. I don’t have the time, energy, or need to do that right now, and I doubt that I would ever want to depend on something like that to make my living. If anything it would be a side project, in which case I don’t know if I could dedicate the time it would take to make it profitable.
5. On the other hand, if I were to make it open source I would force myself (for pride, among other reasons) to put a lot more time into cleaning it up and making it perfect; probably even more so than if it were proprietary. So I guess either way it would take a lot of my time.
6. It’s my general opinion that as someone who does this (software development) for a living, it’s almost always more profitable (in the long run) to release small projects like this as open source.
The reasoning behind that is I could put a lot of work into collecting $15 to $whatever here and there, but factoring in the extra time it takes to do that I’m guessing my net gain would be low (unless there’s a huge amount of interest in it).
However, releasing the software as open source (if it’s *good*) essentially serves as a resume to potential clients that I can do “real” projects for, if they are impressed by what they see. Losing that small (2-digit) amounts that I *might* have gotten by charging for the app is worth winning a contract for a large project, which can easily fall into the 6-7 digit range.
This is somewhat related to the main reason I prefer contract programming to a “full-time” position with one company; you have a better chance of getting paid what you’re worth, whereas if you’re in the corporate hierarchy you will be paid pretty much the same as the guy (or girl) who sucks as a developer. I’m probably getting off topic now, (maybe this should be its own post), so I’ll cut it out.
I’ve got of a couple of ways you could make your project open source and still make some money off it. You could put the source and binary on a CD with an installation program and sell that. The people that bought the CD would also be buying support and you could help them out when they needed it. They might even be willing to pay you in the future to add new features. Some people (me for one) often want to pay a little extra for the convenience and support, even though the source is available for download on the net. You can’t try to prevent people from copying it though as this goes against the open source and free software definitions. You could also market your software with the hardware together. Sell the whole computer boxed up in some plastic thing so people can’t run off with the monitor to people who are looking to add kiosks to their businesses or whatever. Another option that seems to be gaining in popularity at sourceforge.net is to have the software available but not the documentation. Then sell hard copies of the documentation. I don’t know if this is really feasible in this particular case and I think it’s kind of shady to release your software under one license and then your documentation under a completely different one, but it’s an option that might work. Yet another option is that you could open up a business that uses the software itself, similar to what Jamie Zawinski of Netscape and XEmacs fame did when he opened up nightclub and also wrote some kiosk software but I think he had the club first then put together the software. Anyways, open source doesn’t mean you can’t make money off it. Richard Stallman sometimes sounds like a broken record saying that free software is free as in freedom not free as in free beer. It’s the business model that’s different not the economics. Heck, you can buy the whole GNU (IMO the coolest software license) set of software compiled for your architecture for 5,000 bucks.
Of course, how would I know if any of these ideas are good. I’ve never been industrious enough to have to make business decisions and I still look to the Man for my pittance.
Those are some good suggestions, but most of them still involve too much work on my part. Right now, I’m leaning towards making it freeware / donation-ware, and at releasing the source for free as well, at some future point in time (once I can take the time to clean it up a bit).
Nate the first sugestion sounds just like what Lindows tried to do. Although Lindows never made anything.
Don’t know about Lindows but it’s pretty much what Red Hat and other Linux distros do. Although Red Hat doesn’t really cater to the home user anymore and I don’t buy anything from them anymore, but they’re still in business. Maybe the best option is to ask for donations and see how that turns out.
what’s wrong with releasing an “imperfect” version of the software and letting the open source community help perfect it? i understand why you would want to clean it up, using this as a resume, but that’s sort of anti-open source in my world view. i dunno, i guess open source isn’t as innoscent as i thought it was.
No, I’ll admit that I only want to clean it up for the sake of making myself look good. The drawback to releasing stuff online like this (especially if it has a glaring error in it) is that once it’s out there, you can never take it back (it can be archived, mirrored, etc.)
I’m not saying it has to be perfect, but so far I’ve probably put less than 10 hours into coding it, and almost no testing time, so I’d feel better if I at least spent some time analyzing it before I release the source for public review.
but if it has glaring errors in it and contains release notes of known bugs and is an 0.x release…what’s the problem?
It’s not necessarily a problem, just something I’d rather avoid. It’s like when my lack of fashion sense occasionally manifests itself in a particularly bad choice of clothes for the day, to the degree that Martha has to step in and advise me not to go out looking like that. Of course, I could, but I’d rather just change instead.