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Seven Open Source Business Strategies

Posted by Hemos on from the building-an-economic-future dept.

Openstandards.net writes "One of /. posters' favorite discussions is the value of open source as a business model. OSDN has an article on IT Manager's Journal that highlights seven business strategies for open source. " Slashdot and ITMJ are both owned by OSDN.

8 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sleepycat license question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    No. They would require a copyright assignment from you, as seen in projects such as GCC and Cygwin.

  2. Quick answer: No by pegr · · Score: 3, Informative

    Like if I submit a fix/enchancement to MySQL in the GPL version, can they as the 'owners' put that in their commercial license which their customers can release without the source code?

    Assuming your fixes are GPL, they cannot put your changes in the commercial version without first negotiating a separate license from you.

  3. Re:Sleepycat license question by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 4, Informative

    Like if I submit a fix/enchancement to MySQL in the GPL version, can they as the 'owners' put that in their commercial license which their customers can release without the source code?

    If you (foolishly) assign the copyright on your code to them, then they can do whatever they want. If you keep copyright to your patch, they can only use it under the license you have chosen.

  4. Re:Missing option: consumer desktop business model by idfrsr · · Score: 3, Informative

    I would imagine that in order to successfully do this you need be a hardware company. If you can provide commodity hardware with commodity software that presents a viable consumer alternative (read marketable to average joes as the best thing since a toaster for this new sliced bread stuff) then you might be able to make it. This is really a marketing problem rather than anything else. Generate a kick ass device by intergrating open source solutions with commodity hardware and your product development is much cheaper.


    For example the L600.

    In the end, to be successful with this strategy you have to be a kick ass marketer to deal with the big guns at the top of the food chain.

    --
    "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
  5. Cygnus by Henrik+S.+Hansen · · Score: 5, Informative
    Cygnus was actually the very first company to deal exclusively in Free Software (back then the term 'Open Source' was not yet coined). The company's founder, Michael Tiemann actually got the idea from the GNU Manifesto, which outlines ways to make money from Free Software.

    Cygnus primarily provided support, but I think they also did some development. Maybe someone can elaborate?

    In my mind, Cygnus is a good example of how a small company can survive on just dealing in Free Software. Many people need support, or perhaps need custom-made changes to Free Software.

    AFAIK, Cygnus is now part of Red Hat, and Michael Tiemann is CTO of Red Hat.

    1. Re:Cygnus by PhilipPeake · · Score: 3, Informative
      I was a Cygnus customer - yes, they did do development work and provided support for the GNU compiler which was much better than you would get from any commercial compiler vendor -- particularly hardware vendors (SUN, HP, IBM, etc).

      One of the problems that they always had was that they were "customer driven", and tried to evolve the GNU compilers in the direction that favored their customers. This put them in direct conflict with the "official maintainer" of the GNU compiler suite, and, from time to time, with RMS himself.

      I was rather sad to see Cygnus swallowed up by the RedHat monolith.

  6. Re:One interesting thing by platos_beard · · Score: 3, Informative

    Huh? All except one involve distributing open source code:

    Optimization - give away good, sell better code.
    Dual license - give away good code, sell same code to anyone not wanting to GPL their modifications.
    Consulting - give away code so people will hire you to customize it.
    Subscription - give away code, but get people to pay for more convenient distribution of it.
    Patronage - find someone else to pay you to give away code.
    Hosted - (this is the one) write code based on free software that only you use.
    Embedded - Give away code tailored to hardware you sell.

    --
    What's a sig?
  7. Re:Out of curiousity... by flonker · · Score: 2, Informative
    Serious question, Why do articles linking to OSDN owned sites ie: NewsForge, ITMJ, etc have to always have a remark like: "Slashdot, , are owned by OSDN" ?


    It's common practice in journalism, so that the reader is aware of any potential bias caused by the relationship. So, I'm not sure why slashdot does it.