Aspects of Developing With, and Using, Open Source Software
From the point of view of commercial entities, this is, of course, the killer question - what business model, incorporating open source software, will enable them to make money? In the dot com years what I call the 'pure greed' model was pretty successful. This is a scheme whereby you put together a spreadsheet showing vast losses for the next five to ten years, followed by incredible profits. You then show this to venture capitalists and wannabe millionaires, and they give you money. The practitioners of this model were impressively successful and garnered huge amounts of money, most of which they blew away on the three Cs - Champagne, Caviar and Concord - after which they went back and got more money. Unfortunately for them, all good things come to an end (both the money and Concord in this case) and the market started demanding real, rather than virtual, profits. While the dot coms were experimenting with defying the laws of economics, a number of companies were trying out other models, the most successful of which has been the 'software as a service' experiment. This is the idea that the code is only a small part of the whole package and that the real money is to be made selling the auxiliary and support services that are needed by any serious commercial software. It is my belief that this will emerge as one of the key business methods for companies using Open Source methods, although it's taking a long time. I have no doubt whatsoever that other viable models will emerge, and it may well be that you will find something different for your particular product. |
If you have any questions or comments about the articles on my web site, click here to send me email. |