The web site
Follars.com was created to answer the trillion dollar question: “How can companies make money from open source software?”. Follars stands for
Free,
Open SourceDo
llars.
Free & open source software (FOSS) is changing the business rules of the software industry at a pretty good pace. It is an interesting paradigm, and appears to be a worthy competitive business model to the closed/proprietary business models that have held sway so far. However, the question that has dogged practically everyone in the FOSS domain is that of making money. Well, perhaps it is not a trillion-dollar-question, may be it is only a billion-dollar-question, oh all right, if you insist, at the very least it is a million-dollar-question for many companies.
The idea behind
Follars.com is to collect at one place all the insights, thoughts and resources for the problem of making money from free & open source software. No doubt, some companies (such as Red Hat, for instance) have started making a reasonable amount of revenues, but still many feel that we have a long way to go before we can feel confident that there is a sustainable revenue model for FOSS. There are a number of bright minds and exceptional companies that are putting their thinking caps for this.
Follars.com hopes to be a small catalyst that facilitates this thinking process. By being a site focused on this problem alone, we hope to be a forum where ideas are exchanged, explorations done and sustainable revenue (and profit) models for FOSS are evolved. At the very least, we at
Follars.com hope to have made more people aware of this issue.
We hope you find this site to be of use. We’d be grateful if you could send across any link or resource suggestions, or your own thoughts on this question, so we could consider using those to everyone’s benefits here. Suggestions & opinions may be sent to
Narsi
We are starting off the site with providing web references to many useful articles & resources on this subject.
