Business of Free and Open Software (FOSS)

Introducing Free & Open Source Software (FOSS)

These are software that gives you the liberty to use, copy, study, modify, and distribute it in any way and any form. Importantly the source code is made available for anyone to view and modify to and make it better, in contrast to proprietary software, where the underlying source code is usually hidden from the users.

Benefits of FOSS

The benefits of using FOSS can include decreasing software costs, increasing security and stability (especially in regard to malware), protecting privacy, and giving users more control over their own hardware. Free, open-source operating systems such as Linux and descendants of BSD are widely utilized today, powering millions of servers, desktops, smartphones (e.g. Android), and other devices. Free software licenses and open-source licenses are used by many software packages. (Wikipedia)

Business of FOSS

Its unbelievable that the underlying concept of FOSS is a business Model, you might find it difficult to believe but just follow along with this post. Considering the cost of developing, supporting, and maintaining a proprietary software is alarming it eats into lots of business running cost and is a no Go area for small businesses (For any business/individual who might have engaged in this endeavor, will understand what I am talking about) High cost of software led to software piracy and other computer vices. FOSS help obviate all the issue of software piracy (Why would anybody want to pirate software that is Openly available). There are many businesses model attached to FOSS but I will just point out part of them, which include the dual licensing, extended services, and many undefined businesses models.
Most enterprise and mission critical FOSS software are released under dual licensed i.e they are partly free and partly paid for or completely free and you pay for technical and training support. Take the case of software like Red Hat Linux, they claim the software is free but you pay for technical support (Making millions of dollars from this) or just consider ordinary WordPress and its extensions which is freely available, most of the free themes and plugins have limited functionalities and you will be prompted to pay for the pro version of the theme that has additional features beyond the basic functionalities.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Birth and Death of Bulk SMS Business in Nigeria

Birth and Death of Bulk SMS Business in Nigeria Bulk SMS business experience its birth in 2012, and experience it diminishing return in 2015-16, a lot of factors contributed to the birth and death of the business which nobody can blame anybody for it. This should serves as a learning point for anybody who wishes to go into any online business most especially any business promoted beyond the value. I believe Nigerian are smart set of people who always jump on the bandwagon of opportunities from whatever and wherever it is being presented to us. but we should also be cautious of jumping into bad businesses and investment opportunity or too good to be good opportunity. My experience learn from all years of developing various SMS solution has helped forged my new business model for a bulk SMS business and led to the creation of my own SMS solution meant for Personal and Business SMS needs at https://www.sms2profit.com I launched this simple website ( https://www.sms2profit.com ) i
Read more

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE LEARNING A PHP FRAMEWORK

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE LEARNING A FRAMEWORK One of the most interesting part in the technology development business is change, the most dominant technology today will be fast forgotten as soon there is new zing thing on the block. Technology of today has make technology of yesterday silly and technology of tomorrow will make technology today silly, the technology business and environment is evolving and its evolving fast, so those of us the development community must always race against machine which doesn't have to be. In order to beat the machine at its own game is to change the rule, “ when you change the rules on what controls you, you can always change the rules on what you control”. This post is about understanding how the game is being played and how to define your own rules and eventually enforcing your own rule in the game, t his is what you need to know before picking a new framework, although not compulsory but necessary, I wont teach you which framework is bet
Read more

Free Open Source Software That Could Make You Rich

Hello Everyone, I will love to ask you this important question What does the richest man on earth does for a living? He sells software for a living. Today I will be sharing with you software licensed under the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that could make you some money perhaps make you rich. This software are gives you the freedom to copy, modify, and distribute it (with friends and families), but not sell or claim ownership of it. You might be thinking at this point how would you make money from a software that is initially freely available and cannot be sold? This where the business model of Open Source Software comes to play, at least there are four basic ways of making money with open source software namely: Support: By offering paid support for software licensed under open source could make you tons of money, I once worked with a firm who make a living providing support for Moodle installation and management in a school in UK, the school decided to run online course
Read more