With open source gaining widespread acceptance, the dilemma for most of us who don't clearly see a solid business model based on an open source model is really around risk and payback. The temptation of seeing a huge number of downloads of your newly open sourced software is enticing but not knowing how many real commercial opportunities and deals it would boil down to is where the real challenge lies. In the traditional direct or channel sales model, it is (to a certain extent) possible to predict the outcome of your sales efforts. In the new world of open source, especially when it comes to business application software, its unclear who would shell out dollars to upgrade from the free bee version to the commercial version. If any of you open source pioneers out there is listening, i would love to hear about your success stories. I'm not interested in stories from the Apache and JBoss types, i'm more curious to hear from those of you focused on business application software.
This is just one of the aspects of open sources that is intriguing. The other is the true benefit from the open source community. Well, i'm going to hold this topic for my next posting :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment