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Open Source Business Models
I’ve got a student who’s working on starting a company around a configuration management system he wrote while he was working for BYU and has licensed. I’ve seen the system in action and it’s pretty good. Shops with over a dozen machines could use something besides a spreadsheet to keep track of all this.
He’s been working on various parts of the business and decided he wanted to open source the software and build a business around the open source code base. I don’t know much about that business model, so I hooked him up with Matt Asay. I’m sure Matt will be able to give him some pointers.
Just this week, I published Scott Mace’s interview with John Roberts, the CEO and co-founder of SugarCRM, an open source CRM system. John and Scott spend a lot of time talking about open source business models and how they work. There’s the traditional pay-for-support option that Redhat and jBoss have made famous and the hosted-services option that’s becoming more popular with the growth of SaaS.
Posted by windley on July 26, 2006 11:01 AM
Comment from eIT at August 9, 2006 10:55 AM
Interesting, I hope your student is indeed able to find a business model, because that will mean so can many others!
Making revenues from free & open source software is one of the most frequently asked questions these days. While there have been a few successful examples of companies (like MySQL, Red Hat etc) which are making money, I’d surmise that these are still very early days for open source revenue & profit models.
While open source as an operational paradigm certainly has been having exceptional success against proprietary and closed-software models in the recent past, in my opinion, a lot more thought need to be given and experimentations done before the emergence of viable revenue models for the free & open source models that can successfully compete with the current proprietary software revenue model. Some specifics of the business models are emerging fast, but it will take a few years for the market to test each of these out and hopefully, the fittest will survive.
A site that focuses exclusively on revenue models from free, open source software is Follars.com – Free, Open-source Dollars - http://www.follars.com !
Ec @ IT, Software Database @ http://www.eit.in
Comment from Branchen-Listing at August 24, 2006 3:34 AM
A very iteresting thing - it shows once more: You just must have an idea, and if the idea is good, things will run...
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