Sungchan Choi wrote:
Thanks for providing the free ethereal software. It’s very useful in
developing protocol analysis tool and I have a question regarding your
business model. You supply your product for free, then from what you get
profit?
For most of us, from nowhere. :-)
As with GCC, the Linux kernel, {Free,Net,Open,Dragonfly}BSD, GNOME, KDE,
Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc., the software isn't sold, so
there's no profit.
The development for free software is "paid for" in various ways.
Some companies exist that accept contracts to develop new features or
other improvements to free software, and contribute the results of their
development to the free software project. They might, in some cases,
provide the results to their customers immediately, and contribute the
results to the project some amount of time later, so their customers get
"early access" - if the customers don't then supply the software in
binary form to others without allowing those others to give the results
away or to get the source code to the changes and give *those* away,
that doesn't violate the GPL. Cygnus did that for various GNU tools
such as GCC and GDB; Red Hat, who bought Cygnus, might be doing that.
Some companies exist that sell support contracts for free software, and
provide support only to paying customers. Red Hat does that for Linux
distributions, for example.
Some companies might consider some piece of free software to be a
"commodity" - for example, they might consider operating systems to be a
commodity - and make their money from hardware or consulting, and
contribute to the development of that free software. That might be
IBM's view of Linux.
Some companies might use a tool and add capabilities to it because it
helps them in their work, and consider it to be a good idea to
contribute those additions to the free-software project for that tool.
They might think that not having to maintain their changes as a separate
version of the software, re-integrating them into each new release of
the software, is worth letting their competitors have access to the changes.
The Ethereal project doesn't have a business model because it's not a
business. (Ethereal has a .com domain because ethereal.org wasn't
available - somebody else had it.)
There is at least one company providing support, training, and custom
development for Ethereal:
http://www.etherealsoft.com/
There are also companies that have developed new capabilities for
Ethereal and contributed them back. I think much of the VoIP
capabilities fall into that category, as the contributions often come
from people with e-mail addresses in domains belonging to makers of
telephone equipment or to telephone companies.
