Recently, I have come across blog posts where authors and commenters alike were considering that the whole open-source fad is going to cost a lot of programmers a lot of money and quite possibly make it very hard to earn a living by writing code.

The popular non-wisdom is that most of these programmers have paying jobs that put food on the table, so what they do at home after-hours is a hobby that ends up being useful to other people as well. This way of thinking says that if everything were to eventually be open-source, no programmer would make money from his or her trade anymore. From the start, let us agree that open source does not need to equate free of cost. I am very much for the first model, for practical as well as conceptual reasons, and I think software can be sold while retaining that quality.

If open-source takes over and commercial applications are driven out of the market completely, all these unemployed programmers might start charging for their version of the software¹. Much more exciting, they might start charging for custom extensions and modules that they will not own upon completion. That way, the code can be open source, but since the copyright is transferred to the client, it is up to that client to decide if the code goes in the open or not. The developer is not allowed to make that decision. Certainly, some may argue that this is not so different from the current model of software development — and with that I agree. Though that is still possible, so open-source is not destroying the environment as much as it is shifting the paradigms.

Before someone pipes in, the GPL is not the only open-source license out there; it is its viral nature that makes some of the things above rather difficult.

So, beyond donations, services around software (like RedHat provides) or custom, for-pay modules, what other styles of open-source centric business models have you seen or can think of?

1. Considering that, by such point, some version of it might be in the wild [↩]