[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models

[Paul Ramsey]

Xen is one of those things where the market is SO DAMN HUGE that even  
the very SMALL proportion of money that an open source company can  
wring from the marketplace is actually non-trivial in an absolute  
sense.  If Red Hat is only monetizing 0.01% of the Linux marketplace,  
that's still fine, because they are making millions.  The best market  
places seem to be "enterprise" software with large new markets.   
Examples of success stories are JBoss, Red Hat, Sleepycat, MySQL, and  
note that the last two are actually "sort of" open source companies,  
in that they still fall back on the software-for-sale model for  
revenues.

The trouble with the geospatial marketplace is that it is relatively  
small, so the small proportion an open source company can monetize is  
smaller still.  The problem with service-oriented FOSS businesses is  
that they don't make money from software, so the easiest thing to cut  
in budgeting is core software development.  Let the product languish  
for a while, it doesn't cost you anything as long as service business  
keeps flowing in.  Or, in the case of pure consultancies, don't do  
any core development at all, just use the software.  The service- 
oriented FOSS business I think has serious structural problems, not  
around providing good service, but around strong incentives to  
nourish the underlying software.

P.



On 3-Jan-08, at 8:58 AM, Christopher Schmidt wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 10:26:51AM -0500, Lucena, Ivan wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am *not* going to disagree with Andrea, Gilberto, Paul, Howard or
>> anybody else. I just want to point out a interesting open source
>> business model that is making a big impact this days. I am talking  
>> about
>> Xen [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen].
>>
>> I keep reading news and more news about new commercial products  
>> from big
>> software companies based on Xen. Is that possible on the GIS world?
>
> Depending on what you're reading (I can't tell from a quick Google  
> which
> types of stories you're talking about), I'm not sure how Xen really
> plays a part in the commercialization.  Xen can be used to host  
> products
> in a virtual environment, and if that is the case, there's no money
> being made off *Xen*, money is being made off the other software.
>
> I could be wrong. I just didn't find anything to back up either way in
> the Wikipedia and related links.
>
> Regards,
> -- 
> Christopher Schmidt
> Web Developer
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