Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 16:17:31 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSD direction/Damonnews article Message-ID: <p0510030cb74a8232d675@[194.78.241.123]> In-Reply-To: <15140.35316.140495.9735@guru.mired.org> 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> <p05100304b749db542efa@[194.78.241.123]> <15140.35316.140495.9735@guru.mired.org>
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At 4:05 AM -0500 6/11/01, Mike Meyer wrote:
> 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?
A primary source of income would be consulting, training, and
telephone support. I would add a fourth source of income through the
provision of commercial services related to the product in question.
> Do you have examples of companies that follow this basic model with a
> different income source?
Sendmail is doing the first three, but Nominum is doing all four.
I think that setting up as many additional sources of income, from as
broad a community as possible, is vital to the future health of the
company.
> 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.
Problem is, TiVO is taking a loss on each box they sell, and then
making it up on the service side (the lifetime subscriptions). As a
customer, I don't want to continue to pay $19.95 for the rest of my
life, so I'd be much happier taking the Philips DVR, whereby you buy
the hardware outright (at a higher price), but then the channel
information is made available at no cost.
Also, a TiVO is useless outside the country where it is sold,
because the telephone number that the box is programmed to dial is
hard-coded. A Philips DVR can be used in any country, because it
does not depend on being able to dial up a particular telephone
number to get the necessary information.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
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