Making an open-source living, part 1

While it's now accepted that you can make money from open-source software, most of the examples given tend to be very large companies like IBM and Novell.

Steven Noels is Managing Partner at Outerthought, a small Belgium-based consultancy specialising in projects built around Apache Cocoon, a Java-based application framework. He's also a member of the Apache Software Foundation and the Apache Cocoon Project Management Committee -- as well as using open-source software, he contributes his time as a coder and helps to run the organisation.

ZDNet UK sister site Builder UK spoke to Steven recently about his experiences working with open-source software in a commercial environment. We started by asking how Steven and Outerthought got involved in open source, and find out it wasn't based on any particular philosophy:

"Originally our interest in open source was on a purely technical level. We do a lot of work with the Apache Cocoon project which taught us a lot about open source -- legal aspects, the community -- which was interesting, and eventually helped us to help our customers, and to build stuff for them and release it as open source as well. But it started out as a technology interest, and only after a while -- for us it took around a year -- did it become something that we saw a business model in."

Noels sees this as different from a lot of the recent activity based around open source, where the decision may be taken at a management level. "What we see now is a lot of companies who do open source because of business strategy, whereas with us it was very different. We were confronted with open source because it was a cool project. We started working in the project and around the project, and it was only after a year that we saw it's possible to earn money by adding stuff to this project, and by people requiring assistance and additional help. It hasn't been a business strategy from the start -- it evolved into one."

Small consultancies like Outerthought normally exist to provide bespoke software for their customers to solve a particular problem. While that's true, Noels sees their job as being more than that. "We've been doing development for a long time, so what we sell to our customers is our experience. Most of our customers have their own developers -- our largest customers have development teams of 30-40 people, who are working on old technology, like Cobol, and they want to move to a new technology like Java. They could do that by taking a Java course, and moving on from there, but it's very difficult to have people change mentality to the one needed for object oriented development."