September 9, 2006

BarCampJozi: Open Source Software and Business

September 09th 2006 Posted to BarCamp, connections

Anton from Obsidian took a great session on OSS and Business, especially looking at the kinds of people who tend to play with open source and their subsequent entry into the business world. Here are my notes (more for myself, so not edited properly):

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“The e-myth revisited.” <- a great book.

Major challenges:
- Focus. So many different things to do and so many different ways to make money…it’s easy to lose focus. Pick one things you’re good at and stick with that.
- Business Model – very NB!! If I’m selling hours, how am I billing that out? What am I going to charge and how many hours do I need to work?
- Find a value proposition – trying to explain to a suit why this is important. You have to find a way to make the cool tools that you’re playing with interesting to a business person who’s playing golf.
- Skills that you need…some don’t come naturally to a geek so either learn them or get someone in who has no tech skills.
- Google Ads (the geek way of fixing marketing)
- Client care (post-product follow-up)
- The Peter Principle: everyone gets promoted to their level of incompetence.
- Be aware of the divide between tech people and business people, and how you can bring the 2 together.
- Managing people from a legal and HR perspective.
- Different business models for making money from OSS:

- Sell the software
- Selling proprietry extensions to OSS
- Services. Subscription model (like Red Hat)
- Training. Certifications.
- Look at what Google is doing with OSS (tessarat OCR)

OSS in SA – Red Hat, banks, etc. Ubuntu is really making any entry into this sector.

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