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Making money with free softwareMaking money with free softwarePosted Jun 26, 2003 14:52 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)Parent article: Making money with free software 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.
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