Must Certain Technology Be So Difficult to Replicate W/ Open Source?

I’m always amazed by the amount of open source offerings these days, as well as how many there aren’t. Whenever I get an idea or a thought, I immediately search the various repositories for an “open” version of the software to improve upon and make it exactly what I’m looking for. Case in point; our proximity marketing system. As stated before on this blog, we’re interested in taking proximity marketing to a new level.

The thought has always interested me, and I know the simplicity can be replicated with some slightly creative software, but where is it? I’ve searched high and low for anything related, and there just isn’t much around. BlueZ provides an open source bluetooth stack which seems to work, but it leaves out the all critical GUI to interface with the server and hardware. To be a useful product, the user needs to be able to know almost nothing about using it.

While slowly but surely, software makers are moving to the “open” business model, it still raises the question of if it’s going to work or not as a profitable business plan. I understand the thought of working endlessly to perfect your offering and then having to struggle thinking whether or not to offer it free and open or not, but isn’t getting a large user base the goal of any software offering? If you get the users, you get the traffic, and you get the user base to profit from using other models. Support, add-ons, integration services, and more come to mind as useful ways to monetize your free offerings. If people can get some use out of your product, it’s free of charge, and you can modify the software in any way you see fit, it’s an all around good model to live by. You can even offer your core technology as an open source offering, and then sell your advance use of the code as a product or service to monetize it.

In my opinion, software makers need to step it up a notch. Remember, MySQL just sold for a reported $1 Billion, so the monetization opportunities are there if you have a good enough product and the people actually use it. I know MySQL is an exception, and it’s a basis for which most other open source offerings operate, but it’s a still a good indication of where the industry is going…don’t you think?