While there is no way a short report could fully equip you to become the next Bill Gates, we want you to recognize that these days making software is easy to do, easy to market, and you don’t really need to know much about programming to do it.
The following are the five most common questions we have been asked recently.In simple English what are the basic steps for developing software?
There are four essential steps no matter how you look at it:
1. Define requirements – what you want to make and what it will do
2. Develop code to meet those requirements
3. Test the code, debug/fix/enhance it
4. Distribute or deploy the finished software product
Open Source refers to a broad-based approach to software development and distribution that began in the 1960s and took the form we think of today starting around 1985, then more emphatically in 1998. As the Free Software Foundation put it 20 years ago Open Source software is “free as in free speech and not free as in free beer,” though in many respects elements of many open source platforms are in fact free in the latter economic sense as well.
Open Source means the source code for a piece of software is readily available for free.As a general proposition, if you can develop your software using Open Source tools and standards instead of commercially licensed ones, you will have lower development and licensing costs, though these relationships can get complicated and in many cases open source software is only financially “free” to individual users, not commercial ones.
There is also a strong anti-commercial – or at least anti BIG commerce – thread through the open source movement.
Pepsi and Coca Cola consider their “secret” recipes the most valuable things they have, but meantime, some wise guys called Open Cola have reverseengineered their drinks and posted recipes that result in startlingly similar beverages…
Do I need to pay some kind of ongoing license fees for commercial development products I use to make my software?Generally, no, unless you actually use pieces of someone else’s software within your own – such as the runtime version of Corel Paradox we mentioned earlier, which has to be licensed for each instance it is resold.
Licensing the output of development tools would be like Microsoft trying to assert rights in Stephen King’s next novel because he wrote it using Word!What do I need to worry about in terms of liability with my software?
Two things mainly.
The software should do what you say it does when used the way it is supposed to be, and you have be very careful in your End User License Agreement (EULA) in listing out what uses are legally acceptable and how much liability your company is willing to accept – i.e. none except the price of the software in the event of a failure.
Consult your legal advisor in helping craft your EULA.
© Copyright 2006 by Michael Rasmussen and Jason Tarasi - All Rights Reserved.