I just chose to stay out after reading a bit more of your replies, here and in other topics, they all tend to go the same way and it's not towards a proper discussion...
1. Then we need to define what it means by monetary value. Both free and proprietary carry a development cost so they are equal in this point, therefor I should ask what differentiates both license schemes that makes one have no value and the other have value. You never sell software, you sell either the service of developing it or a license for it's use. If my company develops software by request I'm selling the service of developing the requested software, in the end the software is not mine it's owned by the company/person who bought the services. If I develop software and then "sell it", I'm selling a license for it's use and not the actual software. The only situation where you effectively sell the software is when you completely hand over your rights to another company/person. You can do this with both license schemes so where is the difference?
I actually see none but I may be missing something. To me, they both work the same way, only the restrictions applied to whomever buys are different. Moreover if I can generate a monetary revenue from the software, again in my view, the software has monetary value. Either by providing services around the software or by allowing other people access to the binaries against payment, or whatever other ways you find to generate money, they come from the software. It doesn't matter if it's free or proprietary.
So I guess we need to define the monetary value of something like software before we can agree or disagree.
2. I don't like to mention names, and Google has everything nowadays. Still I can mention Funambol as an example of a company that had a big growth in 2008. Could they have bigger profits if they were only developing proprietary software? Maybe. But that's something we can't say. But even considering that they could, going with free software didn't made them bankrupt
. I could also mentioned a more known one like Sun with their free software projects and you can easily find more if you want to.
3. Marketing never takes just a couple of months, it's lasts for as long as you want to make money from the project, even with projects that are well established in the market you need to push on marketing campaigns.
As a developer I consider that in a project full of other developers the biggest obstacle is
not, in fact, development. It's the only thing a group of developers has for free, and the only thing they need to make the project, though it's not what they need to make money.
Projects never reach the a stable release for several reasons, but I can only speak by my experience and in those where I was involved it was never about development skill or the development of the code. Most of the times is for completely unrelated things like personal life changing your interests and goals or the lack of funding to continue. As for statistics I have a favorite quote: "73.6% of all statistics are made up"
(due credit )This is another area where we must agree on disagreeing.
4. And I maintain that resources (not only monetary) are the main problem. A lot of resources are needed to take a project from an idea and transform it into something that you can put in the market, let alone make it generate money. You need marketing personal, accounting and management personal, salesmen, if we are talking about games we also need graphic artists. All these people need to either invest their time or be paid, both resources that are scarce.
Can you say that a proprietary software project will generate revenue, do you have any guaranties about it when you see a project in paper? In both proprietary and free you need to risk and I don't see most of the developers having the necessary monetary or time resources for starting and maintaining a project.
5. Isn't the lack or money to invest, a real problem? Or the lack of a qualified marketing professional (even amateur) a real problem? Do these problems only manifest themselves in free projects? Or are they not problems?
I sell software that is free. It cost me time to develop but I now sell as part of a complete solution that packs together the software, some basic configuration and some theme development. You can get the software for free at
http://code.google.com/p/stay-simple-cms/ or you can by it from me. The software has monetary value to me, it's from it that I get paid and without it my "packaged" would make no sense. Would a proprietary solution work best? I don't know. I also have a proprietary project
https://www.plesform.com (Portuguese only and specific to the Portuguese market). The free project actually pays me more than the proprietary one. I have other free projects that have better changes of providing me with revenue than my proprietary ones.
Am I selling services instead of selling the software and it's completely different from proprietary? I think not. In one free project I'll launch sometime next month (I hope) I'm actually going to sell the binaries ready to install like you would get in a store. The only difference is that you can also go to sourceforge.net and download the source code. And yes, I have good expectations about being able to sell it.
I guess we have completely different backgrounds and see things very differently, so this is my view on the subject and I agree with you that I can't see it like you do
, I see ways to make money by developing free software, they have their constraints and peculiarities but it's the same in any other field and as long as I can go beyond the break-even point, I'm generating profit.