1. 1. 4  Summary

We have seen in basic terms and from an economic point of view what setting up a viable business is all about. To summarise, it consists of creating a product or service that is beneficial to our customers, so that we can charge for it while keeping costs under control.

When setting up a business based on free software, the crucial financial question is: what product or service can I charge the customer for? Before moving on to discuss this in the next section, we will look at a series of relevant economic features of the software industry that we will need to understand in order to answer this question.