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The #1 economic reason why Free and Open Source software has been successful is the additional value you generate from the improvements that other people contribute that you would not otherwise receive if you had not gone Open Source. It turns out that this makes economic sense for ALOT of things. You created something you needed that didn't exist beforehand, you spend a little extra time documenting it and **voila**, other people found it useful and are suggesting improvements you never thought of. ## Level up future contributors with new skills = profit My big passion is reducing the cost of making that documentation thus making it more economically viable for more people to produce documentation; I recoup my investment when I learn from everyone. Similarly, someone with soldering experience teaching another person to solder benefits because they've just "level upped" a new potential contributor. I've very keen on thinking about how we can use the Farm Hack network to level up new contributors... ## Revenue models for accelerated development That said, other revenue streams can accelerate Open Source/Hardware development so it's worth talking about. jdb's list is a good list of revenue streams for Open Source projects. For the **folks who are interested in developing a tool business**, I'd like to add one more revenue stream that is **specific to Open Hardware**. - Support - offering support/modifications/customization for a fee. - Training - offering training and "How To" information for a fee. - Customization/modification - although in the software world, modification has to fit within the license, it can still be done at a fee. - **Builds/kits** - offering a fully built version or at least all of the parts in an often easier to assemble way. P.S. I'm loving the talk. Keep it up.
Forum comment

Hi jbd - I actually pulled the trigger on this today because there wasn't any objections. We still have Event Forums and Tool Forums but every forum that was under the General section is now consolidated into one forum called Farm Hack Talk. It's generally the idea that you don't need specific forums for general talk. Instead I've added a "tags" field to topics so we can allow some what of a structure to start to grow organically out of how people think their topics should be organized. The tags don't really show up at the moment but I'll make tag clouds and such later. For the time being, we now have nice list of consolidated topics that we've been talking about that don't fit into specific events or specific tools. I hope that people will find it much more inviting to post because they don't have to worry about posting it into the "wrong forum". On the Organic Groups note, you are right, a Tool actually acts alot like an Organic Group in Drupal. You create a Tool and it has it's own content (wiki and forum topics) just like you can create Groups and add content to that group. I opted for not using Organic Groups because, at the time of coding this website, the Organic Groups module was undergoing a rewrite for Drupal 7 so it wasn't production ready.
Forum comment

Probably the most important feature for holding us together, bringing us back, giving us faith we are talking to someone. By seeing who our notification will be sent to, we know we are heard, we know it's worth speaking. By making it easy to manage what we hear, we are better at being proactive in the places that matter to us.