Linux World / Network World 2006

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 08:49:12PM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> How can people make money from Open Source? I hear this question all 
> the time from customers. They are used to paying for software and 
> figure that if a given software package is free, its author did not 
> believe it was good enough to sell.

You sell a physical piece of hardware which uses open source code on it
that you customize to do something unique and useful on your hardware
and offer support for it.  People will pay money for that and be quite
happy about it in general.  They don't really care if you think the cost
of the software is $0 and the hardare $1000 as long as the price is
$1000 that they pay.  You could charge $900 for software and $100 for
hardware if you wanted to claim that was the difference, but they still
pay $1000 for the overall product.  Do you really care how much GM pays
for the wheels on a car?  No you care how much they charge for the car.

> They are not necessarily obvious to those who are immersed in Linux 
> either.

Lennart Sorensen
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