Making Money From Open Source

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Guy Snir
Filed Under Open Source, Opinion, Business |

Duncan Riley has an interesting post on TechCrunch “How Grey Is Your Valley: Making Money From Open Source“.

The post is about Matt Mullenweg the founder of Automattic, and his comments on making money from Open Source. As a general rule I am all for making profit from Open Source, it helps keep the engine running.

I do not have any details on the hinted conflict of interest, having Matt making profit from a WordPress “failure”, but I think that this is a situation that could happen and does happen. The first example that comes to mind is the Dual Licensing model; Typically, a company will expand / improve / enhance the Open Source licensed software and sell it under a closed license. In this case you also have a “conflict of interest” where these advanced features are not inserted into the Open Source code.

This is part of the Open Source model and I find that it works well. If, for example, fixes, features, etc get blocked by the project leaders because of a commercial interest, the community might choose not to participate or join a competing project.

Because of the Open Source model, these things usually cannot be done in the dark, and are open for all to see. We have the choice to use it or not.

Update: Read Matt’s comment on the post

Guy

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Comments

4 Responses to “Making Money From Open Source”

  1. Matt on August 22nd, 2007 9:43 am

    WordPress has never, and will never, do a dual-license model like you describe, for the same reasons you describe. It has always been all-GPL, and we’ve never developed or sold add-ons that weren’t also GPL.

  2. Guy Snir on August 22nd, 2007 9:49 am

    And I think that is a good thing.

    I gave the dual-license example to explain why I think Automattic has a right to make money from WordPress in general and Akismet specifically.

  3. Guy Snir on August 22nd, 2007 9:56 am

    On topic: Came across this from a couple of weeks ago
    Linus Torvalds: Open source without commercial interests = crap

  4. michel v on August 24th, 2007 1:26 pm

    You give too much credit to Riley: the post is a piece of hate crap.

    Matt posted about Vanilla spam links saying they were “a bad idea”, Duncan read way more into it to the point of posting “Matt Mullenweg is against people making money from opensource”. Like whoa, drop the booze, dude.

    Hell, English is not my mother tongue and even I can understand that Duncan put words into Matt’s mouth just so that he could badmouth him.
    Or, do I have to understand that readers of TechCrunch don’t read the fucking article?