Suhit Anantula's Library tagged opensource →  View Popular

If you take the position that open source licensing is a means
of encouraging Internet-enabled collaboration, and focus on the
end rather than the means, you'll open a much larger tent.
You'll see the threads
that tie together not just traditional open source projects, but
also collaborative "computing grid" projects like SETI@home, user
reviews on amazon.com, technologies like collaborative filtering,
new ideas about marketing such as those expressed in The Cluetrain
Manifesto, weblogs, and the way that Internet message boards
can now move the stock market. What started out as a software
development methodology is increasingly becoming a facet of every
field, as network-enabled conversations become a principal carrier
of new ideas.

I'm particularly struck by how collaboration is central to the
success and differentiation of the leading Internet applications.

Marten has compiled a nice list of 13 hybrid business models with open source in this blog:

"1. Software is free but we need donations and subsidies to survive (Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse, ObjectWeb)



2. Software is free but we sell ads and placements (Mozilla)



3. Software is free but if you embed it in closed source, you better pay a fee (Trolltech, DB4Objects, Funambol, MySQL, etc.)



4. Software is free but services are not (Covalent)



5. Software is free but on-going maintenance, monitoring and provision of binaries is not (Red Hat)



6. Software is free but some enterprise features are not (SugarCRM, Zimbra, JasperSoft)



7. Software is free but we built a closed-source product around it (EnterpriseDB, GreenPlum)



8. Software is free but hardware is not (Sun, Asterisk/Digium)



9. Software is free but we sell everything else on the planet, including closed source software (IBM)



10. Software is free but that's not our real business (Ruby on Rails, individual contributors, etc.)



11. Software is free but we regret it (Borland with Interbase)



12. Software is free because we dumped it and don't want to see it any more (any good examples?)

13. Software is free because we want to drive web traffic (Google GWT, Yahoo YUI)"