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I am not a business expert. That’s certainly one reason I’m in academia.

Recently, Rich Apodaca questioned the business case for open source and the small company (i.e., in science).

To me, this question comes around every year or so. There are an increasing number of open source scientific programs, so it’s only natural to question how to make a profit from it.

Not surprisingly, there have been many people to discuss this topic:

• Dan Gezelter at OpenScience.org had a series of thoughts on how to make money from Open Source scientific software, including posts on selling hardware, and selling services.
It seems like he never wrote about dual licenses.

• Dan Bricklin, the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, posted some of his thoughts on open licensing for small businesses and cites Frank Hecker’s business plans for open source software.


• Craig James, currently at eMolecules, wrote about The Lifecycle of Software Technology. He suggests that software has a natural lifecycle as it breaks out, matures, and stabilizes — and that companies can be designed to make money in different ways depending on the maturity of the software.


• A related post by Glyn Moody suggested that the importance of open source science required funding agencies to get involved.

Personally, I think Craig’s essay has a lot of insight. People (and I also mean funding agencies) want to pay for the latest and greatest thing — whatever seems the most interesting. There’s rarely much money in maintaining software. Funding agencies don’t really want to fund bug fixes either.

I pay for science software and I also develop open source scientific software. I suspect the same thing is true for others. So what drives someone to pay or code yourself.

So I think there’s a market for open science businesses. If I were coming up with a business plan, I’d like to see:

• Interesting: There must be something compelling to convince people to use (and buy) your product.
• Broad Market: Even if you aim for a niche with big spenders, it’s not a guaranteed steady source of income. Once you’ve filled the niche, what do you do?.

I can imagine several possible business plans based on elements mentioned by Bricklin and Hecker. Case in point — many chemistry textbooks include copies of Jmol now. There must be a business in textbook publishing, since there seem to be a dozen or so for different undergraduate courses.