How Do You Make Money in Free Software and Open Source Software?

You can make money in free software by building a great product, marketing it with skill and imagination, looking after your customers, and thereby building a brand that stands for quality and customer service.

Open Source is not a liability but a competitive advantage. The Open Source development

model produces software that is stable, flexible, and highly customizable. So the vendor of open-source software starts with a quality product.

      The trick is to devise an effective way to make money delivering the benefits of open-source software to you clients. Most commonly companies will adopt a license that allows for free distribution of their software if the user is not using the software for a commercial purpose, but if he is he must pay the publisher a license fee or royalty. Open Source is defined as software that includes source code and a free license--these partially open-source companies provide source code but without a free license.