Good grief, Charlie Brown! Do I actually have a client who is willing to pay for the development of an Open Source project that anydamnbody can grab for free afterwards? Yepper, doodle!
A buddy of mine created a startup commercial cleaning service. He did a couple of years' worth of research and then started buying equipment and making other investments. One of the investments he is making is an interactive web site with a communications facility (Connection) for his customers, cleaners, and account managers to all share info on what's happening. There were some existing commercial software solutions that were either too expensive or insufficient to the cause. So, he came to me to build him a new system.
I am doing all the PHP and MySQL work to get this Connection thing built. My local graphics design partner is doing all the look and feel stuff to make the site more pleasing to the eye. The real breakthrough here is that the end user just wants a system that meets his needs and is configured for him to use it without grief. He doesn't want to own the code or sell the service; he just wants to use it his own bad sef. I can put the code in the public domain as Open Source and maybe get other geeks to contribute.
The cool part of all this is offering the service of installing and configuring the Connection service to other businesses. Unless these end users are hip to installing and whatnot they will pay to have the Connection service hosted on somebody else's server with just a login or a link on their own site. Eh? Profit through ignorance. I love it.