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 certified experts with your product. Assemble copyrighted educational …

"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: $0
Annual Maintenance & Support: $18 (2)
5-Year …

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 nefarious intent any more than viral marketing infers nefarious intent. On the …

Following the launch of the Open Database Alliance some people have assumed that it is only a matter of time before MariaDB becomes the de facto replacement for MySQL.

That assumes that Oracle will allow the development of MySQL to stagnate, either deliberately or through neglect - something that we have expressed our doubts about, but even if that were the case it appears that the GPL (or more to the point MySQL’s dual licensing strategy) may restrict the potential for MariaDB.

Curt Monash recently raised the question of whether closed-source storage engines can be used with MySQL (and, by …

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 making my source code open and freely available, but what you do with it …

Jetlagged from transatlantic travel, I woke up in the middle of the Californian night thinking about what has changed since I arrived at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara on Sunday evening. I was pondering all the questions MySQL users and Sun colleagues were asking at the event, and what the user base was thinking out loud on Twitter yesterday.

What has changed is obviously that Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun.

What further changes we will see as a result of that is a different story. Evidently, I don’t sit in with a crystal ball predicting what will happen next. Nor do I have insight into Oracle’s plans for MySQL, …

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 think I should try to counteract the misinformation about it if I can. Note that in this article I will …

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 …

When Monty Widenius published his criticisms of MySQL 5.1 recently a lot of the coverage that followed focused on his belief that the product had been made generally available too early and has too many serious bugs.

A solution to this problem would have been told hold 5.1 back even longer for more testing or, better still, not to have announced it as a release candidate so early. However, reading Monty’s post in full indicates that this would be a matter of treating the symptoms rather than finding a cure.

He also wrote: “the MySQL current development model doesn’t in practice allow the MySQL community to participate in the development of the MySQL server” and “I think it’s time to seriously review how the MySQL server is being developed and change the development model to be more like Drizzle and …

I wrote yesterday that Christensen’s law of Conservation of Attractive Profits could be used to explain why open source vendors are increasingly turning to hybrid development and licensing strategies to generate revenue from open source.

Before I could think about doing so Arjen Lentz wrote a comment that did a lot of the explaining for me.

To recap, “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution, states:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the …