I seemed to have touched on something in my very recent Making money with Linux? article. I was pointed to a rebuttal written by Martin Owens by some fellow developers in the FOSS community.

Before jumping right into this, I would like to make a cople of things clear. First off, I do not claim, nor have all the answers. Secondly, I am glad for the differing opinions. I firmly believe that posing the question and having different opinions will lead us all to the answers.

Alright, so in Mr. Owens article he had several issues with my opinion of making money on software production in the FOSS communities. He first pointed out issue with my original statement:

"Commercial software being generally closed source is a necessary evil."

The two main points of Mr. Owen's concern with my statement are that I was assuming that closed source software is the only method to turning a profit with any software. His second was that I was assuming FOSS is 100% non-commercial.

So starting with the first, the assumption is not that software can only be close source to make money on it, when in-fact quite the opposite is true. Producing open source software can be quite lucrative. Some great examples of corporations making money from open source software are, Oracle, Sun, Canonical, and so on. There are so many I am sre I wouldn't be able to research and name them all.

The point from my statement was not to say closed source applications are the only way of doing it, but it is the accepted business practice that affords corporations protection of the creative productions. We will come back to this later on.

Mr. Owens goes on to point out that by association I was saying FOSS is non-commercial. The fact is, FOSS is in fact quite commercially based. Take for example, Ubuntu backed by Canonical, Red Hat, SuSE backed by Novell, and so on. FOSS is big business. However in light of my previous statements in the original article, I was making the point that while FOSS is commercial through support services and other means, the software itself is generally rejected by the community unless it is Free (and I mean Free as in Freedom) itself.

To ensure this is not taken from context either, I would like to point out that I believe Free and Open Source software is great for everyone involved. the FOSS community provides so much advancement and growth in the world of Information Technology that might not otherwise exist.

Continuing on with Mr. Owen's article he goes on to point out a common confusion on the use of the word 'Free'.

"However creating software as a business requires a level of production protection that is not usually accepted in the Linux circles. Compiled and protected sources are a bad thing for software freedom and progress, however they are good for free market business."

A free market allows any person or business to entry and freely compete with any other person or business. It however does not afford a person or business the right to infringe/reproduce or otherwise make money directly from another person or business' goods or services without their direct consent. I am not talking about reselling goods and services on behalf of the originating party (i.e. Big Box Retail Stores). I am however talking about focusing on making a profit from another person's invention. Making a copy of a Monet Painting and reselling it as your own painting is forgery, the creativity behind creating applications is nearly the same.

Free and Open Source software while sharing similarities to the free market model, does have one very large difference. FOSS is shared, its like taking that same Monet painting, except now Monet rather than creating his work of art alone had several other painters contribute to the painting and provided the painting freely to the world for their contributions to further enhance or change and redistribute as they see fit. While this participation and vast pool of knowledge and opinions has worked wonders in technically moving FOSS forward and remains its driving factor, it is however not why people (including myself) go into business.

Finally, Mr. Owens points out something quite astounding:

"My own thoughts are that in order to fund software production properly, we need to have ways of getting money from users who want software to be made or changed, to programmers who want to earn money writing software. It’s not an easy task."

In a perfect world, this would be great. everyone would get compensated for their creative productions and contributions to the whole. However, being this is a less than perfect world, and less scrupulous people are out there trying to make money from other people's hard work, businesses need to protect themselves and ensure their goods and services can make them money. This is not to say the only way of doing so is via closed source software, but closed source software gives most business owners the comfort to jump into the mix and produce software. Closed source gives the piece of mind to know that the business will continue to make money on the product and that not just anyone will jump in and start to redistribute their product to make money.

In the end, the sad fact is, businesses need that level of comfort that closed source brings to attract them to the venue. Businesses need to make money and continue to do so over the long term. Most traditional businesses do not feel that is possible by sharing their code with the entire world.

Donations are always welcome, really.