How Does Free Software Make Money? - GameGame

Have you ever thought of trying to make money by selling stuff that's actually available for free and before you came up with air and water PepsiCo and gas stations already beat you to the punch so sorry fortunately this also happens a lot in the tech world with open source software open source is a term that refers to any kind of software whose code can be used and distributed for free plenty of well-known programs and even operating systems are in fact open source such as Firefox Android and Linux just to name a few and this openness is a key to modern technological innovation because one of the ideas behind open source software is that it can help businesses and organizations by allowing them to collaborate more easily on the development of the same open-source software platform instead of a bunch of different proprietary ones in fact some companies with a more traditional business model like IBM are well known for providing funding to open source projects simply so that they can reap the benefits of the new technology without dedicating their own human resources to its creation now that's business lots of big companies love open source software because it spreads out the burden of checking for security issues and open source apps can be easily modified for special purposes an example of this last one is the way that many smartphone manufacturers tweak Android to give their users a more customized experience for better or for worse another way that open-source software can make money is by monetizing features and services other than the core software itself a good example of a company that's thrived this way is Red Hat which develops and maintains its own open source Linux distribution the source code for that distro is free but Red Hat makes money by selling additional features such as proprietary add-ons for the core product they also sell support training consulting and technical assistance because simply taking the source code and deploying it can be difficult without the company's expertise additionally customers can pay to have the Linux distribution modified to better suit their specific needs Red Hat also sells automation and infrastructure as a service meaning that a client doesn't have to have tons of hardware to actually run the software or store related data if they're willing to fork out some cash other companies have different approaches sometimes a developer will offer a free version of a certain piece of software that can be downloaded installed and run on the clients hardware but also offer either official hardware designed to run that software like IX systems does with their Free NAS open-source operating system and true Nass lineup of servers or they might offer a paid software as a service version that's stored on the company servers and maintained by the company so the client doesn't have to bother messing around with hardware or troubleshooting yet another way to make money off of open-source software is one that isn't really technical at all and is a little more obvious advertising a prime example of this is actually Firefox traditionally one of Mozilla x' biggest sources of revenue has been from Google or Yahoo paying as much as hundreds of millions of dollars a year to be the default search engine provider in their browser another key revenue generation strategy is ecosystem Google's Android is a great example here unlike traditional operating systems which would cost money upfront for the user or device manufacturer Google decided to develop and provide Android for free turns out they were playing a long game and now that everything from phones to TVs to car stereos runs on Android these days they're raking in massive amounts of money from users buying content and apps for their devices with Google taking a cut on each transaction many open source projects also survive by raising cash from their users instead of enticing customers to buy something related the Wikimedia Foundation for example stays afloat just from merchandise sales and those banner ads that remind you that if everyone gave today they would be finished fund raising in four hours or whatever you know I come to think of it maybe skip that donut at the Tim Hortons today for your health and for human knowledge speaking of knowledge those in the know that fresh books is the small business accounting software custom-built for how you want to work fresh books is the simple way to be more productive organized and to get paid quickly create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster and see when your client is seen your invoice and put an end to the guessing games for your unrestricted 30 day free trial just go to WWF Reshma's comm slash tech quickie I think it's that slash and enter in tech wiki in the how you've heard about a section so check out fresh books.