10:07:53 am, Categories: Computers and Internet, Open Source, 328 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
Open Source: Why Freedom Makes a Better Business Model, Marten Mickos, MySQL
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm
-- Winston Churchill
By doing things wrong, we will learn to do things better.
Freedom of speech vs. Free Beer: Open Source doesn't give much free beer away, but they give the customer the flexibility to use the product freely.
Liberating products goes beyond software: eBay freed Trade, Second Life freed socializing, IKEA freed furnishings and the USA freed entrepreneurism. Software freedom is so powerful as ~100,000 mostly white males now between 40 and 60 years of age created the current information society and there are now ~30,000,000 developers with much broader demographics on the Internet today.
Outsized software profits come from
The first three apply well to F/LOSS but the fourth is not compatible with open source licensing.
Filtering results for software companies, closed and open, through the philosophy of open source business models with lower sales and marketing costs, and it may be that open source companies can scale in size with profitability the same as closed source, but get to higher levels of profitability at faster rate, at a smaller size.
Open Source is not a business model, but a smarter way to produce and distribute the goods.
Success in open source requires that you serve two disparate groups.
People in group one may recommend you to those in group two, but are unlikely to convert; still there is benefit to both groups. [To me, this is the key to open source - recognizing, serving and benefiting from both groups. This is why community is so important.]
Marten found a baker's dozen of open source business models in active use today. I'll link to the online version when available. All of them are hybrid models that provide free software, while charging for something else, from services to hardware.
http://press.teleinteractive.net/.Mk3ucWch7fhVbndsciwcFvbhxzcQxbcj0rf7uyb2e_cnb3/trackback.php/765
05/28/07 @ 22:15
The Open Source Solutions Blog is a companion to the Open Source Solutions for Business Intelligence Research Project, sponosred by InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc. This Blog, a Wiki and Lens will be used to develop, support and publish the findings of our research into enterprise open source projects.
InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc. (IASC) performs research in the areas of data analytics, collaboration and remote access.InterASC Professional Services, a service mark of IASC, provides strategic consulting and project management for data warehousing, business intelligence and collaboration projects using proprietary and open source solutions. We formulate vendor-independent strategies and implement solutions for information management in an increasingly complex and distributed business environment, allowing secure data analysis and collaboration that provides enterprise information in the most valuable form to the right person, whenever and wherever needed.
TeleInterActive Networks, a service mark of IASC, hosts open source applications for small and medium enterprises including CMS, blogs, wikis, database applications, portals and mobile access. We provide the tools for SME to put their customer at the center of their business, and leverage information management in a way previously reserved for larger organizations.
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 |
