Making money with Open Source

The first argument you will hear from businesses concerning open source is that you cannot make money with it. Au contraire. There are companies making money with open source and we'll look at a few and look at some ways that you can use open source to make money, making games.

Creating Titles

If your focus is making games and not creating technology, open source is an excellent way to focus more of your resources on the game play and less on the technology involved. A line of titles could be made from open source code, keeping the content of the game protected and making money from that as normal, just the cost of development would go down. I believe this would also help to shift the focus of games from eye-candy to content.

Selling Support

Much of the money made in selling libraries is actually in the form of selling support. This is included in the initial cost of the library, however many have an additional fee for each continuing year after the first year. The same could be done with open source software. The support could include initial training for the product, setting up systems for the product, implementing specific changes to the software and telephone support.

Selling Libraries

Dual licensing is the best of both worlds. This can be a working model for companies who make money from selling libraries. There are a couple of ways this could work. First you could all, you could charge for the licensing for the binary distribution if the developer chose not to have the entire source of their game freely distributed under a GPL license. Secondly, you could do like Garage Games (www.garagegames.com) with their Torque engine and maintain distribution rights to a finished game. However, to make either of these methods work, the code and the license must be controlled from the ground up.

Sleepycat Software (www.sleepycat.com) is a great example of making money using a dual license. Sleepycat makes an embedded database system called Berkeley DB. Berkeley DB is a programmatic toolkit that provides fast, reliable, scalable and mission-critical database support to software developers.

Sleepycat uses the GPL license with an added binary distribution clause. Basically, the clause says you make use the software freely as long as you make the source code freely available and redistributable by others. If you chose not to make it open source, then you can pay a licensing fee to SleepyCat. Redistribution is the key to making money this way.

According to Sleepycat, the secret to making a dual licensing work is to own the licensing rights to all of the code. If a programmer wants to submit changes to the Berkeley DB toolkit, then the changes are given to an engineer board for review. If the code passes review, then the programmer is asked to give the licensing rights to Sleepycat. The code is then added to Berkeley and Sleepycat maintains total control over the licensing of the product.

In addition to making money from the binary distribution, they also make about 25% of their revenue on support.

On October 15, 1999 in a Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) interview, John Carmack said, "We make a fairly good chunk of income from technology licensing, so it would take some damn good arguments to convince everyone that giving it all away would be a good idea."

Here is your damn good argument. Of course, these are easy arguments for me to make, I'm not the one to stand to loose a large chunk of my income by taking this risk.

From what I have read, the majority of the companies that license technology from id or Epic, end up making modifications to the engine because they want that added edge in their game. I don't think this would change if the core of the technology were freely available. Companies would still want to keep the advances to the engine in their project only.

A big upside for opening the source is the end user adding value to the engine. This has happened in the past for id. According to a Wired magazine article, when id released three levels of Quake on the Internet to be checked for bugs in the networking code, not only were the bugs found, but hackers also provided patches to fix the code. This even went as far as hackers finding non-functional features and activating them. Mike Wilson (then with id) was quoted, "The joke around here now is we can let the rest of the world finish Quake for us." This wouldn't be a joke with open source.

Peripheral Makers

If you make the drivers for soundcards or force-feedback joysticks open source, you increase the potential of your hardware working on a greater number of platforms. With peripherals there is probably no revenue from the drivers so the cost of moving to open source is minimal.

Having the drivers readily available, and modifiable encourages developers to add support for a product in the game. This increases the number of products and sub-sequentially the number of potential end users for their product.

Nvidia does this type of thing, making source code specific to their product freely available, in order to create a greater demand for their product.

Writing

Who could better give a view of a project that one of its developers? There are many writing opportunities available. A book about using the software could be helpful to developers using the software. Magazine articles about the technology used in the software would help to give greater insight into the project and give back to the community.

While this isn't an option for everyone, there are those who could make money this way. A variation on this theme would be giving speeches about areas of the software.

Downsides