Re: free markets:programing in Opensource

From: hal@finney.org
Date: Wed Jun 20 2001 - 13:22:59 MDT


Robert Coyote asks,
> I ask the simplest question
> How does one finance ones life as a programmer when you give away all your
> creativity and work for free?
>
> what is this "external funding" ?
>
> How do you buy a House by programing in Opensource?

One of the wealthiest people I've met personally is John Gilmore, founder
of Cygnus Solutions, which made its money purely off open source software.
Cygnus sold commercial versions of GNU software and provided for-pay
technical support for businesses. And they cleaned up. The company
ended up being sold for something like 600 million dollars to Red Hat.

So don't think you can't get rich off open source. John's net worth
must be nine figures.

(This was actually John's second fortune, his first was made as one of
the first employees of Sun Microsystems.)

Hal



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