That New Market Is A Lulu

Red Hat co-founder Bob Young is back in the game, and his latest idea is a Lulu.

Actually, that's its name -- Lulu. Lulu is designed as a marketplace where open source code developers can sell their work and make money.

His "grand opening" specials include pre-orders of Open Office and Red Hat's Fedora Core 3.

Markets like Lulu meet one of the key challenges facing Desktop Linux today, the need for a place to buy and sell new Linux applications. Since even the Windows market has moved decisively to the Internet, it was obvious that the Linux application market would be online, so this is a very good thing indeed.

But the Lulu home page has it right in a very important way. It's all about the developers, not the buyers. Developers set their own prices, they can create boxed sets, and they're not just offering to sell code -- they're letting you create print-on-demand booksand create an e-commerce back-end.

I should not quibble, but it seems to me Lulu could also create a marketplace for coders' time, with resumes and methods for hiring people remotely. I suspect they're going to get there very soon.

To learn more about how to sell on Lulu, click here.