There is once again a lot of fuzz going on about Open Source Business models,

First on my eyballs was the article that Customers don't seem to like openCore what a big surprise ..

So that's not the one that makes the customers happy ,

Then there is the other side of the coin, the people that create open source
Authors realize the dual licensing model comes hunting back at you after a merger or a hostile acquisition, yes they still have the source code to build on but they can't sell commercial licenses to their customers anymore they way

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Where are you going to invest your time and money. You may invest in your kids, your work, your hobbies, and more. As you make these decisions, your passion is one consideration, but another is the return on your investment. Of course, you want your investments to be successful. The best way to ensure success is to bet on winners. In other words, you want to invest your time and money on things you are confident will be successful. This holds true in your personal and your professional life.

When Alexandre Dumas (on a side note, my wife refers to me regularly as a Dumas) said that "Nothing succeeds like success" he was encapsulating this same decision process and the conclusion that people want to bet on winners, and that by so doing, they are perpetuating that winning.

So what does this have to do with open source software (OSS)? I received a note from

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Where are you going to invest your time and money. You may invest in your kids, your work, your hobbies, and more. As you make these decisions, your passion is one consideration, but another is the return on your investment. Of course, you want your investments to be successful. The best way to ensure success is to bet on winners. In other words, you want to invest your time and money on things you are confident will be successful. This holds true in your personal and your professional life.

When Alexandre Dumas (on a side note, my wife refers to me regularly as a Dumas) said that "Nothing succeeds like success" he was encapsulating this same decision process and the conclusion that people want to bet on winners, and that by so doing, they are perpetuating that winning.

So what does this have to do with open source software (OSS)? I

  [Read more...]

A lot of folks are unclear on the subtleties of free software and open source. Mike Hogan writes a blog article"Is Hybrid Licensing of OSS Hypocrisy?" to try to shed some light on this. With respect, I think he has missed part of it.We're talking about two orthogonal things here. One is open-source versus closed-source, and the other is whether we charge money for software licenses or not. As

In a comment to my prior post , Roland Bouman raised the issue mixed messages inherent in the dual-licensing model of open source. There is more context to his comment, but he says: "I am all for commercial open source. I am just curious how you feel you can logically defend both ‘take us we’re open and free’ and ‘take us we offer quality paid for extras’."

There are many articles written on the topic of free open source and hybrid models, so in the words of Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride: "… let me

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In a comment to my prior post , Roland Bouman raised the issue mixed messages inherent in the dual-licensing model of open source. There is more context to his comment, but he says: "I am all for commercial open source. I am just curious how you feel you can logically defend both ‘take us we’re open and free’ and ‘take us we offer quality paid for extras’."

There are many articles written on the topic of free open source and hybrid models, so in the words of Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride:

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OK, you’ve released your open source product and built a huge userbase. Now your shareholders/investors are pressing you to monetize that userbase. How do you do it? There are many ways to monetize open source. For simplicity, let’s segment the revenue sources according to who is paying:

Users :
Your users probably downloaded your product for free. Some are willing to pay for certified/approved distributions, maintenance, updates, support and more. Because open source turns your product and services into commodities, you will need to leverage your brand, and the expertise that it embodies, to maintain premium pricing.

Another good revenue source is certified education. If you’ve built a large userbase, businesses clearly see value in your product. As a result, employees and job-seekers will enhance their personal value and marketability if they

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OK, you’ve released your open source product and built a huge userbase. Now your shareholders/investors are pressing you to monetize that userbase. How do you do it? There are many ways to monetize open source. For simplicity, let’s segment the revenue sources according to who is paying:

Users :
Your users probably downloaded your product for free. Some are willing to pay for certified/approved distributions, maintenance, updates, support and more. Because open source turns your product and services into commodities, you will need to leverage your brand, and the expertise that it embodies, to maintain premium pricing.

Another good revenue source is certified education. If you’ve built a large userbase, businesses clearly see value in your product. As a result, employees and job-seekers will enhance their personal value and marketability if they are

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"The support model doesn’t scale well." - Matthew Aslett, The 451 Group

How do you make money with open source? I’ve written about open source business models previously, but I thought it might be valuable to quantify the impact of open source on your business model. The following analyzes the differences between a closed source model and an open source + paid support business model, using an apples-to-apples comparison based on a $100 license fee for the closed source product.

Option 1: Closed source
License Fee: $100
Annual Maintenance & Support: $18 (18%)
5-Year Present Value of License + Support: $175 (1)
Conversion Rate: 100%
Userbase: 1X
Relative Revenue: $175

Option 2: Open source
License Fee:

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The spirit and intent of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GPL license are right on target. However, we must be careful to ensure that the GPL license is interpreted in a manner fulfills the spirit and intent behind its framing. Richard Stallman and associates set out to draft a license agreement that ensures that free software remains free. They didn’t want to see open source become corrupted with the insertion of proprietary code that would eat away at the freedoms they envisioned.

To protect the eternal purity of the open source software, they created constraints on how proprietary code can interact with the GPL code. Their one weapon in this battle is the automatic and forced expansion of their GPL license to any code that integrates with the base GPLed code. I often refer to this process as acting like a virus. I don’t use this term to infer

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The two predominant forms of open source licenses are BSD and GPL. PostgreSQL is licensed under the BSD license , while MySQL is licensed under GPL . While the details are arcane, the business impact is significant, and that is what this post addresses.

The BSD (or BSD-style) License: This license basically says: ‘This code is provided as is, do what you want with it, and include this copyright in your resulting product.’

The GPL License: This license, also known as the copyleft license, essentially says: ‘This is free and distributed as source code, and any addition or extension must also be distributed under these exact terms.’

BSD essentially says I prefer open source code, so I’m

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As you may know, MySQL has a dual-licensing model. You can get the source under the GPL version 2, or you can buy a commercial license.

I’ve recently been hearing a lot of confusion about when you have to buy a commercial license. People I’ve spoken to wrongly believe that they’re required to purchase a license if they’re going to use MySQL in anything but a not-for-profit business, for example. I don’t know how these notions get started, but they do.

So when are you required to buy a commercial license? It’s very simple: when you want to do something with MySQL that the GPL doesn’t permit.

I am not a lawyer, and you should do your own legal research, but misinterpretation of the GPL is rampant and I

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Last week, my good colleague Gerv gently took me to task about requiring that videos submitted to the Mozilla Net Effects video program be licensed under the Creative Common NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (instead of an actual Free Culture licensed like Creative Common ShareAlike license or Creative Common Attribution license) . I thought about this for a while and got to wondering why I’d ever let fear of misuse overcome my experience and common sense.

Licensing and contract choices are often driven by fear and greed. We work, play, love and give in an environment

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