Profiting from Open Source Software

Posted by michael on Tuesday December 7, 2004 @06:15AM from the step-2-is-always-the-problem dept.

Secret Santa writes "Alex Salkever has written an inspiring and Linux-friendly piece about Martin Roesch -- how he went from writing open-source software to building a multimillion dollar company. Excerpt: 'Sourcefire is one of a growing number of small software players that have built new businesses around open-source code. Their business models contain various mixes of proprietary and open-source software components and span the software gamut, from other security companies such as Tripwire to database outfits such as MySQL and desktop-computing offerings like Xandros. Most are still small, with revenues well under $50 million.'"

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Re:Money in OSS? by WaterBreath · 2004-12-07 06:48 · Score: 5, Informative

This is the guy behind Snort and Sourceforge

He's behind Sourcefire, not Sourceforge. Though his open source software is stored in the Sourceforge repository.

Though it is probably superfluous to point it out here at /. there's a big difference. Sourcefire is a company that sells proprietary interfaces to open source security software. Sourceforge is a repository for open source software and a focal point of the open source community.