the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I work on OpenACS, a toolit for building web-based applications. I get paid to enhance the toolkit, adding features. Many times these features are given back to the OpenACS community. Very rarely is one of my clients also in the web application software business, so the generalized features are not giving them a competitive advatage. The integration of the features into a custom application is where the client gets the benefit. Their benefit of Open Source is reduced development cost. It has been the case for OpenACS that a certain feature may be needed by several clients, so development costs can be shared among them, leading to a better and more flexible product.

In addition a client benefits be Open Sourcing the enhancements they financed by keeping their code closer to the distrubuted code. This leads to reduced maintenance costs for the future and helps to ensure upgrades will be available.

So the simple point is that very few companies make signifigant profits from software licensing. The money is in integration and customization. There are definitely a few big companies with a huge part of this market also. There will always be many smaller clients that the huge corporations are not interested in, and really don't have the ability to service. It probably costs more to write a proposal for the large corporations than the budget on many small client projects.

The other serious advantage Free and Open Source software provide is educational. I learned everthing I know by studying and contributing to Open Source projects.