Getting Rich Fast ?
Lukas Kahwe Smith has an awesome post titled "Open Source is not making enough rich people richer" .
Indeed, there is much talk that the VC's , the Investors and different others aren't seeing the big money fast enough, according to them that is.
Does that mean that the open source industry is going bad ? Does that mean you can't make a living when working in the Open Source industry ?
Absolutely not, as he points out there are uncountable people gaining a good living with Open Source, developers working on the different projects as their day job, system administrators managing open source platforms. We are helping out customers to implement Open Source and Free Software. And there are numerous other Drupal, Mysql, Xen, shops out there. Some have their own open source products and create a business on top of that , others are supporting popular platforms locally.
Lots of other companies are innovating on top of Open Source, they are using the LAMP stack or just Linux as an OS to build their products on they need the stability and the features an Open Source stack provides them with and only in this way they can deliver their customers with a stable and cost effective platform. Lots of these companies contribute back to the open source community (sadly some don't ..yet) .
But at the end of the day there is much more money involved in the Opensource world than the money the Open Source product vendors like RedHat, Alfresco, Zimbra, Zenoss and are getting from selling their products.
And that's what counts !!
Comments
#1 Scott Novotny : RE: Getting Rich Fast ?
John: "Getting Rich Fast" sounds like a new diet. Enjoyed ESM blogspace.
Keep on blogging so we can all get rich on open source.
viva sourceforge
R/ Scott Novotny
odadmin@earthlink.net
#2 Bart : 2 sorts of companies
It's the difference between a 'lifestyle company' and a 'high potential company'.
No shame in either of them, but it's the second one that scales and is interesting to investors.
The first one (and I guess the one you're describing when you say 'we') is ok to make a living (even a more than generous living), but will never scale to give investors a decent return.
Again, both choices are ok, but don't expect big wows over the lifestyle companies.