Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 21st Jul 2012 23:06 UTC
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RE[4]: Comment by marcp
by Thom_Holwerda on Sun 22nd Jul 2012 16:38
in reply to "RE[3]: Comment by marcp"
Other than browsers which make money when a user searches, how many successful consumer software products do you know that are open source?
Virtually all web services run on, use or are built with open source software. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and a gazilion others - all consumer products. Then there's browsers (as you mentioned), Android (massive success story if there ever was one), Linux (powers god knows how many consumer products) - and this is just what I can think of without trying.
RE[5]: Comment by marcp
by moondevil on Sun 22nd Jul 2012 19:37
in reply to "RE[4]: Comment by marcp"
Virtually all web services run on, use or are built with open source software. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and a gazilion others - all consumer products.
Closed source server side code, which is paid by the data they get from you to sell to 3rd parties.
Then there's browsers (as you mentioned), Android (massive success story if there ever was one), Linux (powers god knows how many consumer products) - and this is just what I can think of without trying.
Android development costs are covered by hardware sales.
All those examples are not desktop/native applications like Sparrow.
I hope you did a research on your side.
Have you ever seen CMS, Blog, Web Portal, etc software of any sort? it usually shares open source model. It gives you "community" version, and paid one [commercial]. Feel free to contact the authors of this software. They won't tell you how much they earn, but I can assure you that these are successfull businessess.
Examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems
We also have Red Hat, IBM, HP using and promoting open source worldwide.
That's supplementary to what Thom have said.





Member since:
2006-07-30
Other than browsers which make money when a user searches, how many successful consumer software products do you know that are open source?