I did plenty of work: 16h hot days of August getting stuff done on time and under budget. I was satisfactorily paid.

The thousands of creators of the software I installed lost nothing monetarily since they don’t sell copies/licences. It was Ubuntu GNU/Linux that I installed so Canonical got a phone number and a potential client after I left to add to its list of customers. That subscription list is Canonical’s bread and butter. I am no longer associated with that school so I have no knowledge whether Canonical ever sold a subscription for the terminal servers but they could have. There were essentially 4 servers for which Canonical one day may receive income. Shipping the software for $0 was essentially an investment for them. Even if they don’t receive subscriptions from that school, thousands of humans have been exposed to the product and will be aware that it exists. That’s pretty cheap advertising for the cost of downloads.

The folks who contributed code to Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux contributed the code for their own diverse reasons. We know something about LibreOffice and FireFox. I don’t know details about most of the projects involved but people are happy to contribute code. There may be exceptions but we can live without their contributions.

Right – you earned income with someone else’s work. And what income did that/those “someone elses” get?

To be more specific: If I wrote a really great desktop application and released it as FLOSS, how would I get money for my work?

Let me be honest with TM. I hate your guts. You’ve given us some insight into your miserable life. By your own account you are a failed open source developer. What ever it is you are doing, it isn’t working. So let me give you some advice. Keep doing it.

If what you are doing is not working for you, change. Don’t work independently. Depend on people to work with you some of whom have capital, salesmanship, marketing strategies or business-management skills. The problem is not FLOSS but a faulty business plan. The world does not owe you a living because you can code but being able to code can help you make money. Just do it.

Look at M$, for pity’s sake. Do they make money independently? Nope. They get the whole world to work for them as slaves. You don’t have to enslave people but just cooperating on a larger project.

e.g. An example from my life. As a teacher, I was hired by a new school: new building, new staff, new everything except IT. It was not part of my job to buy them an IT system and they had a tiny budget allocation to add that to the school as an afterthought. I developed a plan to maximize the IT that could be obtained with a given budget and made a proposal which was accepted including paying me a bit to do the work. It was pretty low pay because developing the proposal as a one-off thing was a lot of work but in the end, I got paid for summer work during my vacation time and the school got better IT than taking the money to Walmart to see what they could buy. It was a win-win and I traded off lower licensing fees for FLOSS for income for me and a mess of extra/better hardware. Those folks got RAID on servers instead of hard drives rattling all over the building, no malware and huge up-time. I got the satisfaction of putting my knowledge to good use. The school had printers within easy reach within a building 150m long on two floors, and scanners and cameras. It was the best IT I ever saw in a school and they system continues to deliver six years later.

So, I used FLOSS to earn income without selling a single licence. It can be done.

See Apple’s latest annual report: “Total Mac Unit sales 16735″ thousand, 16.7 million machines is nowhere near 10% of the x86 PC market which is around 360 million per annum. That comes to 4.6%, if you’d care to check the maths. That was for 2011. Think there has been a dramatic shift? Check Q2 2012: 4.02 million, about 1/4 of 2011′s product so not much change. Web stats that you see pointing to 10% are from a biased source as you well know and is not a sample of China where they have just a handful of stores or are busy selling iThingies and not Macs.

I make money from open-source projects being paid to fix issues. So if you do have a real open source project there is a possibility I made money from it. I don’t have FOSS project I do support on FOSS projects so I do make money. Main reason I don’t have a FOSS project is my customer base has a lot of different wishes.

“I’m an actual open source developer in your midst and I can tell you that it’s nearly impossible to make money independently on FOSS.”

Do you have a direct customer base. I guess not. This is why you are not making money. Also I use the FOSS software elsewhere to make money by using it. There is no such thing as a free lunch you have to work for it.

iLia
“So what? x86 is not the only architecture. Why not to join with SUN and start producing desktop computers based on spark chips with Linux OS preinstalled?”

When it comes to the fact you cannot interface with Windows due to Patents being in way and MS wanting the same or more in patent charges than they want for a windows license. You are kinda screwed. This is why its important that removable media and other transfer formats are royalty free standards.

Lot of battles over the last 20 years was to get MS hands out other companies cookie jars iLia.

The current battles are to get a few companies hands out the cookie jar.

iLia
“Their CPUs became inferior to the Intels and AMDs, so they started to sell servers with Intel CPU, and thus cut off the source of their revenues and started working for their main competitor — Intel and AMD.”
Wrong on benchmarks sparc chips are still faster than Intel and AMD chips. Software support is the only area where sparc are inferior. That is out of SUN hands. Also its been out of Linux main hands as well.

StarOffice and other things Sun acquired was an attempt to get core software.

TM Repository
“In order for you to claim a Windows monopoly you’d have to claim that Linux has virtually no impact.”
In fact no. OS X got somewhere after its patent grants from Microsoft and the fact MS started being a lot of regular releasing MS Office on it. Did help at that time MS had a 20 percent stake in Apple.

Monopoly abuse does not mean that Linux has had no impact. The list of OS’s destroyed is long. Linux is just the toughest. OS X is only hear because they restarted on BSD code base.

That OS X market share as grown and it directly linked to OS X getting MS Office. You would call a functional Office suite a keystone to getting market share. MS has held that with undocumented formats for years. Only in recent years has they started using documented formats. Even thing with OOXML they did not follow the documentation.

All MS market shares are linked to vendor locking caused by non documented de-facto standards. Most of these are now being replaced by real standards. So there will be a correction.

That OS X goes from 2 percent to 10 percent because MS gives it a office suite says something very important the de-facto standard lock in is strong.

If all the competing OS’s had MS Office we could be looking at a major-ally different market. OS/2 run into the same problem.

Wow! A cursory view of MSFT’s stockholders reveals that a mere 10% of the company is owned these days by principals such as Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer. 75% of the stock in play is held by institutional investors such as your local school board’s teacher retirement fund or your old grandfather’s pension fund.

The highway robberies and muggings by the EU merely move the money from our needy aged, widows, and orphans who rely on these funds to the socialistic societies of Europe where it goes to fuel the kind of irresponsible conduct endemic to these welfare societies. People who have worked hard all their lives are ripped off by these unwarranted fines.

Satan is more likely to find a welcome home with the EU commission than with Microsoft managers!

Europe was helping bleed the beast in the fight for freedom. I see no shame in that. Better that money goes to the european government with its emphasis on freedom than to satan worshippers at M$.

The EU actions were just a shameless effort to tax the success of Microsoft and, after paying a billion or so euros to the EU, all was well. Microsoft could well afford it, since they got close to 100% extra in license fees for EU area license sales.

IE was simply a tactic to keep people using Windows, if you look into history, and it has worked very well. Everyone choosing which browser to run on their computer as part of the Windows initializing process is, if you notice, using Windows to begin with, so Microsoft has triumphed in terms of what they set out to do.

Mohammed Ali called the tactic “Rope-a-dope“

In the strict sense of the word you are a one hundred percent right but in the real world things are not so cut and dried.”

Then by the standards outlined in the articles, Google has a monopoly on search (hell, the term “google” is synonymous with search these days) and iTunes has a monopoly in online media sales. Each has similar percentages of their respective markets to what Microsoft had back during the anti-trust case.

I also like the article’s notion that a theoretical monopoly has several smaller players that have little impact on the main player. Hear that Pog? In order for you to claim a Windows monopoly you’d have to claim that Linux has virtually no impact.

In reality, OSX has taken a healthy share of the market back, climbing from 2% to 10% over the last few years. Apple also brought about the tablet market, something Microsoft tried to do 10 years ago without much success. Most of the new changes in Windows 7 and 8 are in direct response to this. So Apple has a massive impact on Windows, I’d say.

Desktop Linux on the other hand hovers around 1%, within the statistical margin for error.