| ESR tauts services as the payoff ("I wrote the code, I bet I can help your firm efficiently apply to your real problems"). While services can be lucritive, I'd have to say that's a route not all developers can travel.
Another alternative is to create a basic, but critical, tool in open source, and then charge money for utilities related to that tool. Marty Roeche of Snort fame went this route, creating Sourcefire as the commercial side of his passion for network intrusion detection. This route can get a little shady, however, as I've seen (now failed projects) that used the fact that they can use their own project under any license as a way to put an unsatisfactory open source tool out, and then sell the same with a nicer interface (that's not what Marty does). That's shady, because only the owners of the project can do that (with large projects it becomes impossible, but I've seen 1-3 dev teams attempt it). |
