Linux, money, making a living and striking it rich.

Linux is shaking a lot of things up. not just Operating Systems and applications either.

Linux and open source is having an impact on business models and entrepreneurship as well. It is changing how people look at making money with Linux.

Here in the U.S. People dream of the Big Hit, striking it rich with a bombshell that sells for huge bucks. Whole corporations exist simply to find the next Big Hit. They pour countless hundreds and thousands of development hours into software that will be the next wildly successful and madly popular, can't live without app.

Obviously, some darn good software has indeed come from it. True, much of it is geared towards being used ONLY on the MS Windows OS, but the fact is, MS has been dang near the only game in town for quite a We're not going to get into the legitimacy or legalities of how they accomplished that, but suffice it to say, they have managed to keep their OS in the limelight.

MS is not only the King of proprietary software, they "own" the proprietary business model as well. They almost pioneered it.

find an app that fills an established need ( or want ) and throw it out for scads of money, limiting it to only using it one one system and in limited capacity.

people are almost forced to pay for it if they want to be remotely productive. Sure, they can use the shareware and freeware that's available, but how much of it is really worth a nickel? For every thousand freeware/shareware apps available, you find maybe one Firefox or OpenOffice.

There's another type of person out there. The ambitious programmer or developer who doesn't want to get rich as much as they want to get known. They wouldn't mind being rich, but will gladly accept making a good living and are willing to be creative and ambitious and offer a killer app for use on Linux that can do what the "big boys" do, only in Linux. He or she will be willing to charge only $20 for the disk and also make a good business out of providing training and support for using their great new app/tool.

Where is the Linux customer who is willing to pony up the 20 to buy the app. instead of insisting that the best software be free in both the Free thinking and free beer ideologies?

The free beer analogy is the worst thing to ever hit Linux. It creates whiny, cheapskate "users" ( in more way than one ) who are only willing to support an open market and open source as long as it costs them absolutely nothing in time or money.

I am in no way saying that all or perhaps even most of Linux users are this type, but it can't be denied this is not a small bunch of people who make themselves be known in the Linux world.

If Linux wants to make it to the "next stage" of survival and development, it is going to take the users to be willing to put out a little cash for some really good products and it will take some non greedy, creative developers to be willing to make these apps and tools and not charge an arm and a leg for them, but be satisfied for "making a living" instead of "striking it rich".