I'll be very interested in seeing your take on the economics of OSS.
As far as it goes, I've only really seen these arguments so far:
(1) It's great for achieving end goals if money's not an issue/no longer relevant. You're a Netscape or a Sun Microsystems and want to destroy Microsoft's market? Go OSS. You're an nVidia or a ATI and can't be arsed maintaining driver code? Go OSS.
(2) You can sell tech support for your own software. (Of course, if your interface and documentation are good, your market for tech support will be small.)
(3) You can use your software hacking to demonstrate your skills to potential employers and clients. (Except that unless they're techs themselves, it'll be hard for them to confirm which bits you did... unless you're the project's only, #1 or #2 contributor.)
(4) You can trust customers to purchase your OSS software, as many will do the right thing. (In the Shareware world, they've run the experiments: unrestricted Shareware gets registered 1/8th as often as time restricted Shareware.)
(5) You can sell tech support for other peoples OSS projects. By far the most convincing. There's definitely money in it, but, that's more a job not a successful business. Does anyone want to be providing tech support for buggy and incomplete code for the rest of their life?
(6) Paying forward. It's the BSD license way more than the GPL way. For the corporate, it means they can reuse code, while still having the potential to make decent commercial software sales to end-users so developers can pay their mortgages and play with OSS in their spare time. They can also release toolkit code to the world in a way which disclaims responsibility for it.
Feel free to use any of the above in your presentation. Don't quote me though ;-). Do send me a link to your presentation if you put it online.
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As far as it goes, I've only really seen these arguments so far:
(1) It's great for achieving end goals if money's not an issue/no longer relevant. You're a Netscape or a Sun Microsystems and want to destroy Microsoft's market? Go OSS. You're an nVidia or a ATI and can't be arsed maintaining driver code? Go OSS.
(2) You can sell tech support for your own software. (Of course, if your interface and documentation are good, your market for tech support will be small.)
(3) You can use your software hacking to demonstrate your skills to potential employers and clients. (Except that unless they're techs themselves, it'll be hard for them to confirm which bits you did... unless you're the project's only, #1 or #2 contributor.)
(4) You can trust customers to purchase your OSS software, as many will do the right thing. (In the Shareware world, they've run the experiments: unrestricted Shareware gets registered 1/8th as often as time restricted Shareware.)
(5) You can sell tech support for other peoples OSS projects. By far the most convincing. There's definitely money in it, but, that's more a job not a successful business. Does anyone want to be providing tech support for buggy and incomplete code for the rest of their life?
(6) Paying forward. It's the BSD license way more than the GPL way. For the corporate, it means they can reuse code, while still having the potential to make decent commercial software sales to end-users so developers can pay their mortgages and play with OSS in their spare time. They can also release toolkit code to the world in a way which disclaims responsibility for it.
Feel free to use any of the above in your presentation. Don't quote me though ;-). Do send me a link to your presentation if you put it online.