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Making money with free software[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier] The Linux Router Project is dead. So says Dave Cinege, the creator of the project. Though the project has been stagnant for some time, it still came as a surprise to see it officially pronounced dead, particularly given the bitterness of Cinege's eulogy for the project:
The operating system that helped to create the embedded Linux
marketplace, the Linux Router Project (LRP), is dead.
As of January of this year I have finally accepted the fact I will likely never be able to develop LRP into the operating system it could have been. A full 6 months later I'm forcing myself to update this page to reflect this. It is not an easy thing to give up on your life's work. Apparently the cause of death was Cinege's inability to translate his work with LRP into a source of income.
My many contributions to the computing community has reaped very little
personal benefit for myself. As I now struggle to pay the bills I can
not help but feel quite pissed off at the state of affairs, for myself
and the other authors who contributed massive amounts of time and
quality work, only to have it whored by companies not willing to give
back dime one to the people that actually created what it is they sell.
Acknowledgement and referral would have at least been acceptable. Few
companies do even that.
While it's unfortunate that Cinege didn't benefit financially from his work on LRP, it's also an illustration that developers shouldn't depend on their contributions to free and open source software to land them a job or otherwise put money in their pockets. While a number of developers have, indeed, landed jobs as a result of their work with open source, it's hardly a guarantee of gainful employment. And it's true that companies may not even choose to publicly acknowledge the projects they've used to build their products. Vortech Consulting, for example, based Coyote Linux on LRP, but there's nary a mention of the Linux Routing Project on the Coyote Linux site. The relationship between free software developers and companies is often uneasy. A recent bit of company bashing on the linux-kernel list led to this outburst:
These discussions always make me wonder if the open source crowd is
ever going to realize it's reasonable to be friendly with
commercial companies....
The world is not going to end up with all software working perfectly and being free. Software is hard work, software tends to rot if you don't take care of it, there has to be an business plan better than
While Cinege and many others see commercial companies as parasites using their work for profit without any kickback for the original contributors, others see open source as a parasite on proprietary software. There is a fair amount of mistrust and misunderstanding going in both directions. Many unknowns remain in the equation of how free software and money-making enterprises will work together; this situation is likely to persist for some time. It's very clear right now, however, that if a developer hopes to earn a living off of their contributions to open source, he or she will need to come up with a workable plan beyond releasing software and hoping for job offers, contract work or grants to fund further development efforts. Even then, as with any entrepreneurial enterprise, it's no guarantee that they'll be able to pull it off. And, it's possible that someone else will come along and do a better job of capitalizing on your work. Part of releasing software under an open source license is giving up full control of the work. Writing software is just one aspect of what makes a software company, open source or otherwise, successful. Brilliant software isn't enough to ensure a steady flow of clients. Developers who want to make a living off of their open source project will also need to wear the marketing hat, the sales hat, and so forth to turn a freely-available project into money. Some developers aren't interested or adept at doing those things, which is fine. In that case, they need to align themselves with partners or a company that will do that work for them if they hope to turn open source development into a money-maker. That, or resign themselves to the idea that someone else may do it without them. (Log in to post comments)
LRP technology is alive and well... Posted Jun 26, 2003 3:06 UTC (Thu) by fghorow (subscriber, #5229) [Link] See leaf.sourceforge.netAFAIK the LRP/LEAF code fork was motivated by strong disagreements about politics between Cinege and the other developers contributing to LRP.
Cinege on Usenet ... entertaining. Posted Jun 26, 2003 14:23 UTC (Thu) by chip (subscriber, #8258) [Link] I can certainly believe that disagreeing with Cinege on politics would make him impossible to work with. But don't take my word for it; check google groups ... judge for yourself.
Cinege on Usenet ... entertaining. Posted Jun 26, 2003 18:53 UTC (Thu) by melauer (guest, #2438) [Link] >I can certainly believe that disagreeing with Cinege on politics would>make him impossible to work with. But don't take my word for it; check >google groups ... judge for yourself. First, prove to me that the guy who calls himself "Dave Cinege" on those newsgroups is the same guy as the LRP guy. Checking Google Groups, I see posts from 1997 from a dcinege@psychosis.com (LRP stuff) and a dcinege@superlink.net (Politics). They could be the same guy... or not?
Making money with free software Posted Jun 26, 2003 14:52 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] It seems to me that the most successful open source projects are the ones started by people who will be satisfied and benefit if the software works for them. Apache was originally developed entirely by web admins, who wanted a good web server for their own use, and were willing to share the effort and the results with other web admins. Linus was famously just interested in getting something to play with.In order to be successful without a lot of business effort, you need to have goals which cannot be stopped by competition, because you're not going to be working on dealing with competition. The competition to Apache couldn't do anything to prevent the developers from having a steadily-improving web server (either they give them a better server, in which case, the developers are happy, or they don't, and the developers make themselves happy). The competition to Linux couldn't make Linus not enjoy playing with it. Of course, there is always the possibility of unexpected side benefits. But it's not a good idea to undertake an open source project unless you can be certain that you will be glad you did it regardless of what everyone else does.
Making money with free software Posted Jun 26, 2003 16:45 UTC (Thu) by jneves (guest, #2859) [Link] Another day I tripped on an interesting article on what it takes to have a successful shareware business. Most of it would apply to any small software business, so I leave the link here:
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