Open Warrior

Yesterday I was approached by a financial analyst and asked to write some commercial financial software which will be used in calculating bond rates. This is my first commercial project and has created the opportunity for me to test the sustainability of the open source model when it comes to commercial software.

The software will be GPL – it has to since it uses a GPL driver. I’ll develop the application and give it to my contractor, from there it will be interesting to see how the contractor handles distribution and what profits (if any) they make.

Profits can be made with GPL’d and other open source software – one only needs to look at RedHat and MySQL as examples. RedHat and MySQL however are large companies, it will be interesting to see how sustainable the model is for small projects.

I might write a paper on this once the project is completed and has been successfully deployed – I’m sure a case study of this type will be very valuable to the community.

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