Open Sourcing for Longevity

So your software product startup ran out of money and their are no big accounts or bridge funding in sight. Have you considered Open Sourcing your product and continuing as a professional services company. You don't need to die. Just a passing thought I had. Surely your enterprise customers don't mind continuing to pay you after you opensourced your product right?

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How???????

But how does one make money from Opensource, coz opensource

1. I believe is more of a software development hobby.
2. Take sourceforge for example, very few people actually donate.
3. I've observed a lot of projects running out of development.
4. You need some funds to keep the fires burning. Right isn't it?
5. If its free then who'z gonna pay for it? Just download it install it and run it. thats it?
6. There are no fixed schedules for the release. There are no FS(Functional Specifications), DS(Design Specifications).
7. How do you decide which all features to incorporate? Is there any set of practices or guidelines or its just a fancy work of imagination?

What is your take on this guys?

-Shiva

Some of the ways of making money from OSS

The Magic Cauldron suggests how money is being made from OSS.
Commercial Open Source is not an oxymoron.
Grants/Donations is only one model, of which what works better is if someone specifies the bounty amount for implementing a particular feature. Well Open Souce is not "free"(as in beer) software it just means that the source code is available, nothing else changes. Examples of successful commercial open source includes Amanda, MySQL, SugarCRM. Companies making money from OSS include Novell, IBM, Redhat.
Open Source doesn't imply it can't have schedule nor does it preclude FS or DS. Feature addition can be decided exactly the same way as for proprietary software except that feature additions can arrive in the form of diff patches that you go can ahead and merge without paying a naya paisa. And of course google is your friend for more about how Open Source works.

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