From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Jun 11 2: 6: 0 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D3F8137B405 for ; Mon, 11 Jun 2001 02:05:57 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 46893 invoked by uid 100); 11 Jun 2001 09:05:56 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15140.35316.140495.9735@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 04:05:56 -0500 To: Brad Knowles Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSD direction/Damonnews article In-Reply-To: References: <20010604200851.A65559@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <3.0.6.32.20010608140211.00ae4470@mail85.pair.com> <3.0.6.32.20010608153126.00f7d7e0@mail85.pair.com> <3B21407C.2B9E8D6D@pitt.edu> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Brad Knowles types: > At 5:15 PM -0400 6/8/01, Pedro F. Giffuni wrote: > The company does what companies do well -- spend money doing > initial development. It lets the community do what communities do > well -- supporting existing products with a reduced cost by trading > volunteer effort for money. > > This is the open source model that I believe actually works. While I agree that that model can work, your description is missing one important detail - where's the corporate income coming from after they open-source the product? Ars Digita and Digital Creations both followed this model, having open-sourced software they developed as consulting firms. Their income is still coming from consulting. Digital Creations seems to be doing just fine. Ars Digita was doing fine until it went through a hostile management takeover, after which the MBAs started firing the developers - leading to the company having problems. Do you have examples of companies that follow this basic model with a different income source? The other open source model that have evidence of a actually working is bundling open-sourced software with proprietary hardware. There's little or no money in the open-sourced software, but development and maintenance gets covered by the costs affiliated with the hardware. Tivo is doing this. It's not clear they are going to survive the arrival of MicroSoft as competition, but their basic model seems to be working fine. Thanx, http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message