have you ever thought of trying to make money by selling stuff that's actually
available for free and before you came up with air and water pepsico and gas
stations already beat you to the punch so sorry
fortunately this also happens a lot in the tech world with open source software
open source is a term that refers to any kind of software whose code can be used
and distributed for free plenty of well-known programs and even operating
systems are in fact open source such as firefox Android and Linux just to name a
few and this openness is a key to modern
technological innovation because one of the ideas behind open source software is
that it can help businesses and organizations by allowing them to
collaborate more easily on the development of the same open source
software platform instead of a bunch of different proprietary ones in fact some
companies with a more traditional business model like ibm are well known
for providing funding to open source projects simply so that they can reap
the benefits of the new technology without dedicating their own human
resources to its creation now that's business lots of big
companies love open source software because it spreads out the burden of
checking for security issues and open source apps can be easily modified for
special purposes an example of this last one is the way that many smartphone
manufacturers tweak Android to give their users a more customized experience
for better or for worse another way that open
source software can make money is by monetizing features and services other
than the core software itself a good example of a company that's thrived this
way is red hat which develops and maintains its own open source Linux
distribution the source code for that distro is free but red hat makes money
by selling additional features such as proprietary add-ons for the core product
they also sell support training consulting and technical assistance
because simply taking the source code and deploying it can be difficult without the company's expertise
additionally customers can pay to have the Linux distribution modified to
better suit their specific needs red hat also sells automation and infrastructure
as a service meaning that a client doesn't have to have tons of hardware to
actually run the software or store related data if they're willing to fork
out some cash other companies have different approaches sometimes a
developer will offer a free version of a certain piece of software that can be
downloaded installed and run on the client's hardware but also offer either
official hardware designed to run that software like ix systems does with their
freenas open source operating system and truenas lineup of servers or they might
offer a paid software as a service version that's stored on the company's
servers and maintained by the company so the client doesn't have to bother
messing around with hardware or troubleshooting yet another way to make money off of open source software is one
that isn't really technical at all and is a little more obvious advertising a
prime example of this is actually firefox traditionally one of mozilla's
biggest sources of revenue has been from google or yahoo paying as much as
hundreds of millions of dollars a year to be the default search engine provider
in their browser another key revenue generation strategy is ecosystem
google's Android is a great example here unlike traditional operating systems
which would cost money up front for the user or device manufacturer google
decided to develop and provide Android for free
free turns out they were playing a long game and now that everything from phones
to tvs to car stereos runs on Android these days they're raking in massive
amounts of money from users buying content and apps for their devices with
google taking a cut on each transaction many open source projects also survive
by raising cash from their users instead of enticing customers to buy something
related the wikimedia foundation for example stays afloat just for
merchandise sales and those banner ads that remind you that if everyone gave
today they would be finished fundraising in four hours or whatever you know what
come to think of it maybe skip that donut at the tim hortons today
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