We all know, it’s not that easy to make money with Open Source. While Open Source has proven to be a great marketing (and distribution) tool, the implementation of Open Source based business models that are both profitable and scalable, have proven to be difficult. If you can’t sell the software you are missing an important revenue generator of traditional software companies. To compensate for this many commercial open source companies have created so called “enterprise versions” of their software, in most cases sold under a non-open-source license in subscription form. Enterprise version typically include additional features important to large companies - LDAP integration is one of the most common ones - and come with additional service packages such as extended compatibility testing, maintenance or support.  So far so good. But the license models applied can be very restrictive sometimes, asking for the rights on all modifications and developments done by the client for example. In the worst case this could mean that if a company decides to no longer pay for the subscription, the future use of the software installed is no longer permitted and all code developed or changed has to be shipped to the software provider. This is clearly far away from the ideas driving the Open Source movement. And of course many of the commercial Open Source companies apply a much more “free” model. So, maybe we need a FAIR TRADE label to separate the “good” ones from the “bad” ones? You may want to say that Open Source as such wanted to make this distinction already. But as we see there’s constant evolution and some of it may not show into the right direction.

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This entry was posted by Bruno von Rotz on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 11:03 am and is filed under Licensing, Open Source projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.