However, it requires that we can come up with another way to drive our
revenue. If you have any suggestions we will appreciate it.
This is the same question my employer posed to me in my ambitions of
creating an opensource/free RPG centric GUI. I had a conversation with Mark
Phippard (instant messaging rather :-) who now works for Collabnet to ask
some questions on where somebody should start in regards to having open
source software and monetizing on it. He gave me a couple URL's you may be
interested in:
http://www.cnet.com/openroad/
http://producingoss.com/ (an entire book. take a look at chapter 5)
Then there are approaches like SugarCRM where there is a free base-level
framework and an Enterprise version with many more features. The Enterprise
version requires you to get out your checkbook and is NOT open source, but
many companies are more than willing to do that for a fair price and for a
reoccurring maint fee.
You could also start making money with one-off widgets. Just take a look at
SDTimes (trade rag) and note the many companies selling chart creation
runtimes and custom/cool-looking UI widgets.
That would be the other approach to monetize it is to continue selling maint
which I can guarantee people would purchase simply because if they are
basing their core business on a framework, they need to make sure any issues
can be solved in short order by making a call and getting an answer within a
few minutes/hours. What open source gets you in this case is free entry
into hundreds (thousands?) more companies than before that *might*
eventually buy the enterprise version and *might* buy support. Obviously
the hope would be that the higher numbers of shops using it with paid
support would offset the sales gotten previously. Note also your sales
personnel would be less taxed because the evaluation of the software would
have most likely already been done with the open source version.
Going back to open source... you would obviously want to have a public SVN
repository where developers (like myself) could enhance the base offering by
fixing bugs, bettering the programmer experience, bettering the debugging
experience, etc. And because of the license agreement any changes made to
the base software are required to be submitted back to the project and then
the owner of the project gets to determine if it should in fact be added to
the base code set.
Those are my initial thoughts. Hope they are helpful. BTW, if you need
pilot companies to test out this approach I have a solid handful of
recommendations I can give you offline that are current customers of mine.
There are a lot of RPG shops out there looking for the *right* modernization
strategy, and if the entry cost is free and open then I am all over that
recommendation.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
midrange.com
