You asked me how to do something I didn't say you should and I answered anyway. Of course it's very easy to kill of all of my little ideas, especially when you've decided beforehand you won't even consider going open source.
I won't consider open sourcing all my software when all anyone can come up with for a revenue source for me is vague ideas that aren't really well thought out and make no sense. So once again--find a way to may money by giving code away for free and I'll do it.
That's what you get when you remain vague about what your actual product is. If you'd tell me exactly what you sell, I might be able to be more specific. I might even tell you to forget about open sourcing altogether.
I have a better solution that works regardless of what product I sell. Charge people for the product.
The company I work for sells a few applications that I think I can vaguely name without too many people figuring it out. One of them is a application used by dentists for tracking patients, insurance claims, x-ray data, etc... Most other vendors in that area are well established companies that also provide hardware service like installing dental chairs, x-ray equipment, etc... So they can easily drop the price of their application and make up for it by increasing the price of their hardware.
If you would be truly interested, there are ideas to be explored here. T-shirts sound funny, but I'm sure Mozilla made a lot of money that way.
If I were to say that we have 100 customers, how would selling each one of them 100 t-shirts replace the thousands of dollars per year we currently get from software development?
Is Red Hat making money? Is Google? Is Slashdot? Mark Shuttleworth? Michael Widenius? Sun? Linus himself?
Every single one of the people you mentioned falls into one of the following categories:
a) They are independently wealthy through inheritance, good business sense, or selling software.
b) They have another product they sell (like Google Ads or Red Hat and their subscriptions) that prop up the loss of time and money on their software development
c) Their employer has a specific need and pays them to take care of it. When they have free time, they can work on open source stuff.
If they are, does that guarantee success for you too? Of course not.
Correct. I may charge too much or too little for my product. I may be horrible at marketing. Whatever. But we're at the end of your reply and I still haven't seen a decent idea or business model for making money by giving shit away for free. (Maybe I'll get lucky and someone will anonymously donate $250,000 to my paypal donate button. That'll keep me going for a few more years.)
But it isn't impossible either (again, depending on what you do). Also, having a closed source app isn't a guarantee for success either.
Agreed. But the success of the closed-source for-pay applications at my company enable me to have enough free time to design and build an open source app that I think will benefit people.
If this situation happens enough, eventually there will be open source software for nearly everything. At that point, the business model might shift to every company having their own developer just to assist in maintaining/fixing open source software that they use. Like if you were Google and used Linux servers everywhere, you might hire half the kernel devs since their software is saving you significant money. (Hundreds of thousands of 'free' Linux machines while paying a handful of kernel devs $150k/year is small compared to those same machines having to run a $120 copy of Windows...)
