zlacker

>>gnufx+(OP)
I think the fundamental issue is that free software and open software are enablers but not products.

Free software and open software reducing your costs in making products that make money. Be they services (a la Google/Facebook), hardware, operating systems (a la Apple and Darwin), or books (a la OReilly), or consulting (a la IBM).

Open source itself doesn't make money.

So if you can open source and reduce your maintenance costs of something that is required for your product but not really a differentiator it is a win.

If you try to make money from open source itself, either you will fail, or else you will end up either de-facto abandoning open source, or else doing shady legal things to get around it (see the example of Red Hat/IBM in the article).

>>RcouF1+la
News to me. I've been making a living from a GPL'ed project since 2009. It currently generates about $240k/year.

>>PaulDa+Oa
> At this time, the main force behind Ardour is delivered by two people, with less constant contributions from 2 others, and occasional contributions from on the order of a dozen others. Consider that we do support, web site maintenance, documentation, feature enhancements, debugging, as well as development.

> There’s more people (perhaps another dozen) pitching in with translation, release engineering (preparing Ardour for users), Mantis triaging (“Mantis” is the bug database used to keep track of known problems, “triaging” the process of prioritizing/verifying bugs) and other necessary tasks.

http://ardour.org/support_expectations.html

I have a hard time believing that $240k/year is enough to pay an honest market rate to all these people for their time.