Otherwise I would suggest trying to make products using your Ogre library, mostly obviously games. Perhaps small games for iPhone, PSP or Wii.

And yeah, merchandising brings in pennies for us, it pays for pretty much nothing Selling packaged versions also doesn’t really work for something that isn’t in itself an end product, it seems arbitrary for a dev library.

Seriously though, the best advantage of tool sets are that they provide the people with money to spend (businesses, rich hobbyists) the ability to save time with less effort. As you I’m sure know, saving someone time usually results in them giving you money

As for merchandising, I know there were (probably still are) various OGRE things out there (shirts, cups, etc) – which if I recall, never made much in revenue. And I do recall talk of selling official SDK/docs/etc, but decided against.

I think the best way to make money with OGRE would be with content creation tools. But, there are others already making some products for OGRE + Max, and I don’t know how much they make.

Though, it might be advantageous to really make a game product with Ogre and also sell the whole ‘platform’ as a engine. That kind of marketing/licensing seems to work well for Id / Unreal / etc. Though, that understandably takes a big investment to create an entire engine and game.

- Phil

Dual-licensing while attractive to the original developer for a large buyout is hard for the original developer to accept once the buyer decides to close that product. MySQL is one such example, trueSpace is another (although trueSpace was not open source to begin with).

Captive audiences are essentially what turns small companies into big ones, Microsoft being a prime example.

An in-between seems to be the donation route, like Wikipedia, but that can be revenue risky in tough economic times.

Maybe Ogre can go the Blender route, which is to have products released at regular intervals that people can buy into. For example: printed documentation, DVDs, etc. I support Blender, by buying their materials and their DVDs. In return I get the warm fuzzy feeling and in the case of the DVDs – get my name to appear in their credits list.

just a thought. keep up the spirit. the little I interacted with the Ogre community recently I was surprised at how responsive and friendly it really is.

Obviously I still have to make a living, and releasing everything I do under a permissive open source license, while attractive to me personally, will not sustain a business. Revenue from surrounding services works to a degree, and has paid my bills thus far, but doesn’t encourage much ongoing product investment (other than that which I decide to do anyway regardless), and scales poorly. It makes ends meet, but I’m not going to be able to reliably hire other developers based on that model, nor can I fund more projects this way. However I love the opportunities for adoption and community involvement that open source brings, so I’m constantly looking for ways to square that circle. Add-on products (like OgreSpeedTree) are one way, but again there remains a conflict between time spent on those and time spent on core open source work like OGRE. It’s better, because licensing the add-on can provide a non time-dependent surplus which can be reinvested (unlike services which are directly time-linked which means little opportunity for reinvestment), but there’s still a dichotomy. A dual-license setup for new projects has the attraction of aligning business interests and core open source development interests – but the downside is that you need a restrictive license (GPL) to make it work financially, and so far the commercial licenses have often been as restrictive of rights as proprietary ones – whilst I think they should be like MIT but with a payment clause for transferrance (or revert to GPL).

It’s a fascinating area. Unfortunately most of the online commentators focus on online (cloud) models lately, where there’s a far more obvious way to monetise software directly as cookie-cutter, low overhead services (which are therefore just like products, whilst for non-hosted software like ours ‘services’ means time-heavy custom development and consultancy). For those of us in non-hosted software it’s a lot more tricky. You can make other commercial products with the software, but so can everyone else, so where is the attraction of being the person investing in the core? With services being the core developer makes you the ‘go to’ guy, and there’s definitely a marketing advantage for add-ons there too. But is it enough, given what I’ve talked about before on this blog, that most customers are only interested in the end result? Answering questions like this is key to solving the small business open source software production conundrum.

As always, insightful reading. Thanks!

Your argument of GPL becoming a honey trap for users when the project
copyright holder goes in direction different from where users want to
go is intriguing. For example, some problems that existing MySQL users
could potentially have are outlined in the comments at:

http://juliank.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/mysql/#comments

So would MySQL users have faced the same problems they (potentially)
do now if MySQL were originally released under BSD instead of a
dual-license model? Monty argues that there is more MySQL than simply
the GPL code base, which might be true but I wonder whether a
permissive license would have changed that situation.

Look forward to your comments on this as reply or an idea for a longer
blog post.