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1. Continued: How can we do commercial open source
yurim Feb 6, 2003 10:16 AM (in response to yurim)Continued...
The financial side of it is close to what PayPal is doing, and I believe an OSS community site like SourceForge.net or Apache can provide the framework (this is a good way for them to make money too).
My hidden hope is that such a model will prevent the high fragmentation of OSS development because developers and users will be more likely to go with the commercially more successful options.
The projects themselves will be directed by the real needs of the clients.
Software shops would be interested in such a model because it gives them full freedom at low cost. Software shops are already trying to share the expenses of developing tools and components by going open source.
The first example that comes to my mind is Salmon LLC and SOFIA.
Software shops and companies like the Linux distros can be the interface to end customers and software groups like JBoss can be the framework/tool providers.
All this stuff is kinda theoretical, but I strongly believe that there can be a good commercial model for open source. -
2. Re: Continued: How can we do commercial open source
davidjencks Feb 19, 2003 10:21 PM (in response to yurim)You might be interested to take a look at the Firebird Foundation which was recently organized to support people working on the Firebird database. Basically (as I understand it) quite a few firebird users are contributing a certain amount/month and they vote on which features will get support for development. I kind of like the idea of spreading around the cost of developing new features, yet providing direct support for it.