We have all read stories about people who have experimented living without spending any money whatsoever. By growing their own food, washing in the river, using a solar panel to provide electricity, and bartering for certain goods and services, these adventures have met with limited success. However, for us mere mortals the simple fact is that we need money.

For some reason, people still can't seem to get their heads around the idea that you can make money, big money, from FOSS (Free Software/Open Source). It's a pity that more of them couldn't have been in New York City this week for the O'Reilly Money:Tech conference.

Open source software is developed for a variety of reasons, with the starting point often being the need to fill a need which the creator of a package faces. It's known as scratching your own itch.

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project.

Talk to any open-source vendor (myself included), and we'll tell you that there's a lot of money to be saved by dropping your proprietary software in favor of open-source alternatives. But is that always the case? And, if so, what are the necessary preconditions for saving money?

What does this mean if you're an enterprise hoping to hitch a free ride on an open-source project? Well, it means that you're better off paying a little money for professional support. Free support is good up to a point, but if that point ends when your job begins, you may be in a world of hurt without it.

In April I donated $5,000 of the ad revenue from this website to an open source .NET project...I was crushingly disappointed to find out the $5,000 in grant money has been sitting in the bank for the last four months, totally unused. That's painful to hear, possibly the most painful of all outcomes. Why did we bother doing this if nothing changes?

The money just keeps on rolling into Redmond and Microsoft's partners, almost faster than ever before!

It's the big problem of the net: how do you make money if everyone can access the files you produce for free? Earning money is not evil, it makes it possible to produce more art or information. It's a waste of talent to need a day job to support what you consider your real work.