Making Money and FLOSS at Robert Pogson

“Rivermuse co founder and open-source veteran Dave Rosenberg believes that while open-source companies can grow, it’s more realistic to see them make no more than $100m in annual revenue and feels that the magical $1bn mark is a stretch goal. The reason? The nature of open source – the fact that code is already out there and you must persuade customers to pay you to support something that their own techies are comfortable with and capable of doing.”

That’s from TFA, “Open source – the once and future dream” , on TheRegister.

Such attitudes miss the point of FLOSS entirely. People need computers to find, create, change, store and present information and anything people need they can create even the operating systems and applications of their IT systems. No longer, if it was ever true, do any corporations have a monopoly on that need and that ability. Businesses can make an arbitrary amount of money around FLOSS because there is an infinite amount of FLOSS to be generated not just the present tiny drop. No IT department, programmer, or geek can possibly do it all. It takes cooperation among huge numbers of people, many of them for-hire by businesses. Many large businesses will find that they need to create FLOSS to do their own work and they will distribute the result. Others will specialize at some level of other to help other businesses and individuals to use FLOSS. No one model is the solution. All models are part of the solution.

The opinion from TFA skips over IBM which makes billions annually from FLOSS. Sure IBM sells mainframes and servers but they also help many businesses create, manage, change IT systems that run on FLOSS. They have 15000 business customers… They create FLOSS. They distribute FLOSS. They configure FLOSS. They manage FLOSS. They do whatever the customer wants. The opinion also neglects that FLOSS businesses are growing at amazing rates. It does not matter that they are small. They will be larger as time goes by and there will be many more of them. Individual businesses will see it is in their interest to create, manage, configure, and to distribute FLOSS, so this is still only the beginning. FLOSS has a lot of room to grow.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.