Simon Dickson, principal consultant at Puffbox, writes stuff about e-government, online news and politics. Some important people read it.

Selling free software

2 September 2008 , ,

Presenting, in the blue corner, Google's announcement of its forthcoming Chrome browser - by the medium of the comic book. And in the red corner, Mr Stephen Fry's armchair chat on the subject of GNU, the movement to create a completely free operating system.

Both are trying to do something quite peculiar: they want to give you something for nothing, and they feel they have to really push the boat out to persuade you why that's a good idea. For the record, I'm not sure either is a presentational success. I find the comic book really hard work to read, especially when it starts talking about detailed tech stuff. And much as I hate to say it, Stephen Fry's video piece is rather dry and a little repetitive. Maybe it needs more Alan Davies. (It certainly could do with better audio.)

Selling 'free' software - normally WordPress, of course - is effectively what Puffbox does. But what am I actually 'selling'? The manifestation is usually in the form of custom theme design, selection and configuration of plugins, brainstorming of new features and functions, plus a bit of coaching and training. But fundamentally, clients are paying for my experience with the product: knowing what it's good at, knowing how to make these things happen, and being able to do it more quickly (and hence more cheaply) than they could themselves.

And as WordPress (well, strictly Automattic) CEO Toni Schneider told the recent WordCamp in San Francisco, it's a flourishing business. You can't say that about much these days, can you? But then, as noted on my last piece about Internet Explorer... I really believe the £0 price tag changes all the rules.

  • If you look in the credits, Stephen Fry didn't actually write it - might explain something!

Stop wasting your time RSS feed

Let us tell you when there's new stuff to read at puffbox.com, by subscribing to the RSS feed.

Go on, show your face

If you want your photo to appear beside any comments you leave here, hop over to Gravatar and upload a picture of yourself. Otherwise, we'll just assume the machine-generated monster is a fair likeness.

Tag cloud

Puffbox.com archives

Search

Alan's comments feed

By popular demand: the comments feed

Ancient history

For posts during 2006 or 2007, Simon's old blog's archives are still available.