[OSGeo-Discuss] Question about FOSS4G Business Models

[Venkatesh Raghavan]

Hi All,

Nice to see responses to the intresting thread started bu
Daniele.

I think what Daniele is looking for is some kind of
a "How to convince a venture (or social) captitalist
to invest in FOSS4G technnologies and/or companies".
Guess the venture capitalist would be inerested to
see some statistical data on how FOSS4G based companies
are growing elsewhere and what are their core business
stratagies.

Hope is see some intresting ideas emanating from this
thread.

Best

Venka

Miles Fidelman wrote:
> One more reference:
> 
> Wikipedia's history of open source
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_history) has a pretty good
> discussion
> of the early days of software development - when pretty much everything
> was open source, but the term had
> not been coined yet.
> 
> Miles
> 
> Miles Fidelman wrote:
>> Charlie,
>>
>> Charlie Schweik wrote:
>>   
>>> See
>>> http://www.umass.edu/opensource/schweik/Chapter_2_schweik_final_draft.pdf
>>>
>>> This book still is being finalized and not yet published. If anyone on
>>> this list reads this chapter, I'd appreciate any comments you may have.
>>> If you Daniele, or anyone else uses content from this in some capacity,
>>> I'd appreciate you contacting me so I can give you information on how to
>>> cite it.
>>>   
>>>     
>> Since you asked.... :-)
>>
>> A few comments:
>>
>> 1.  I seriously question the characterization of open source as primarily driven by volunteers.  
>> History says otherwise.  
>>
>> 2. I'd look for some better sources re. monitary support for early open source projects.  
>> If you look a little harder, you'll find that almost all widely-used open source software
>> started with somebody who was working at a job that paid them to write an initial
>> code base - be it working on a a government contract or grant, or working on software
>> as in internal IT staffer.
>>
>> The examples I always point to are:
>>
>> - Apache (started as the NCSA web daemon)
>>
>> - Unix (it all goes back to Bell Labs, with the BSD variations going back to Berkeley)
>>
>> - Sendmail
>>
>> - Postgres
>>
>> And the list goes on.  (One interesting list of very early projects: http://eu.conecta.it/paper/Some_dates_open_source.html)
>>
>> Yes, a sizeable portion of contributors are volunteers - but some historical spelunking quickly points out that most projects
>> started with someone who was being paid for their time.  (Richard Stallman might be the exception, though MIT provided
>> for his support in various forms).
>>
>> 3. Historically, the motivations you list as "academic and scientific motivation #2 and #3" are the earliest and oldest motivations
>> for open source code - dating back to the period when government funded work automatically entered the public domain (thus
>> predating the entire notion of open source licenses).  Almost ALL early software was funded by the government (notably
>> DARPA and NSF), was shared as academic research, and automatically entered the public domain.
>>
>> Hope this is useful,
>>
>> Miles Fidelman
>>
>>
>>   
> 
>