That was the quite inflammatory topic of a now quite famed talk, given by Bryan Lunduke at Linux Fest Northwest, about a week ago. While the topic implies that it was an all-out flamefest from a disgruntled Mac-user, the reality is quite the opposite. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can do so in the video player below.

However, I’m not here to talk about whether or not Linux sucks, or even what can be done to better it. I’m here to address his other point; the fact that developers need to eat.

Let’s picture an imaginary person called Herbert Hackalot who is an awesome hacker, a great team-player and a valuable asset to any software company out there. Herbert Hackalot would, without a doubt, get many great offers from big companies like Apple, Microsoft, etc. He could bathe in riches and live a life as a “rockstar programmer”. However, Herbert is also a man of principle, and one of the principles that he finds most important is that of openness and freedom - principles that those big companies aren’t too fond of. If Herbert had the opportunity to support himself and his family through developing open source applications, he would create the most awesome applications the world had ever seen.

However, Herbert and his family needs to eat.

Thus Herbert is faced with a choice:

1. He could apply for a position working as an open source developer at for example Novell or Canonical (or any other software company that invests in open source development). However, the competition is very harsh, and Herbert will have to work his ass off to have a shot at getting one of the few positions where he will actually be working on open source applications.
2. He could start his own business developing open source applications. Unfortunately owning and running your own company is a risky thing to do when you have a family to support, and the open source business model has yet to really prove itself for smaller businesses.
3. He could take a position at one of the major software companies like Microsoft or Apple, and probably earn a pretty nice salary. There is some competition for the more prestigious positions, but his chances of being employed are pretty good. His work will, however, be proprietary.
4. He could look for work at smaller software companies that may have some open source elements to them. The salary won’t be amazing and there’s no guarantee that they will stay in business forever.

Herbert is a family man, and while his ideals are important to him, he knows that he needs to put the needs of his family before his own. Therefore he’s probably going to go work for a company that he knows will be in business for a long time, and that he knows can give him a good salary and nice benefits.

And thus the open source world lost another great programmer…

Let me get this out of the way:

If we want to produce free software that is better than its closed-source counterparts, we need great developers working on them full time!

Some great things can be, and have been, achieved through the work of many developers working together in their spare-time. Don’t get me wrong. However, take a look at the very best piece of image editing software available for Linux: The Gimp.

It’s a pretty darn good piece of software! For most home users who just want to crop their photos and maybe remove some blemishes from their face, Gimp is great! I even use it for product photos for a web shop I’m in charge of, and so far I haven’t had any problems at all with it.

However, when compared to its commercial counterpart, Photoshop, the Gimp just doesn’t stack up.

Now I’m not involved in the development of the Gimp, so I can’t tell you exactly why this is. But what I can tell you is that if the people behind the Gimp were able to charge $5 for every copy, and were still able to “sell” as many licenses are they are giving away now - the Gimp would be the most awesome application on the planet by now!

The exact same thing could be said for a number of applications, such as OpenOffice, InkScape, Avidemux (or whatever it is the cool kids are using these days).

Unfortunately, I and a large chunk of the Linux user base are cheap assholes who would probably pirate or just not use applications that cost money to use. So that traditional business model where you pay for a license might not work for open source applications, where anyone could just grab the source and compile it for themselves.

If we want to attract great developers to come work full time on open source projects, we need to be able to make sure that they won’t have to worry about whether or not the users will donate enough money to cover the rent for next month. Something that we’re not really doing at the moment. While young hacksters might have no problem with a little financial instability as long as they get to work in an environment where their work is truly appreciated, and where they get to work on applications that they truly care about, older, more experienced developers need that security if they are to be able to support a family. And without those great, experienced developers we will never be able to fully catch up with the major players on the desktop market.

How to make money?

That’s the question everybody’s asking. If Linux-users are too cheap to pay retail price for applications they want, and we want the source to remain open, how do we enable both large software companies as well as small indie developers to be able to make money developing software for Linux? In some situations selling support might work, for example if you’re distributing an entire operating system, or some application of interest to companies. But what about indie developers who want to make a living developing smaller desktop applications designed for average users, not companies? Regular users don’t buy support, normally.

To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t have the answer for you.

If you have an idea for how to make money both as a major software company and as a small indie developer, please make a comment on this post. Also, if you think I’m a complete jackass who doesn’t see the beauty of FOSS, feel free to vent your anger through the comment form.

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