On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 20:17:15 -0800, Alex Martelli wrote: > Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 17:43:22 +0100, Martin P. Hellwig wrote: >> >> > if I owned a company >> > making profit on software sales (sale =! support) you sign a death wish >> > for using GPL >> >> Apart from Microsoft, and possibly Quark (makers of Quark Express desktop >> packaging software), and perhaps a few console game developers, is there >> any company making a profit on software sales? > > I believe Oracle is doing fine (and they appear to be trying to buy up > most everybody else -- other companies which used to make profits from > software sales before they got gobbled up). I think SAP and Adobe > aren't doing badly, either, but I haven't checked up on them in a while.
My understanding is that both Oracle and SAP make most of their money through consulting and customization rather than licencing or sales. I don't know anyone who has bought a SAP solution that didn't spend an awful lot of money having it customized -- and unless I'm very mistaken, you don't own the customizations you pay for. Adobe, I'm not sure -- I suspect their biggest source of income is royalties on Postscript for laser printers, but I could be wrong. I don't even know anyone who uses Pagemaker any more -- it seems to have been almost completely overshadowed by Quark Xpress. > I'd be surprised if there weren't many relative minnows that I didn't > think of, beyond the few "obvious" big fishes above listed. Yes, there are a few -- Quickbooks and MYOB, although arguably their main income comes from subscription/upgrades rather than sales. But still, consider the sheer size of the software industry, and the fact that apart from the 800lb gorilla of Microsoft, almost nobody can make a profit from selling software. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
