[OSGeo-Discuss] Question about FOSS4G Business Models

[Ravi]

Hi,
some examples about how different European cities have shifted to FOSS GIS for, traffic management, policing and even health, will be welcome.

Such examples can pave the way for new entrepreneurs.

Ravi Kumar


--- On Wed, 25/11/09, Venkatesh Raghavan <raghavan at media.osaka-cu.ac.jp> wrote:

> From: Venkatesh Raghavan <raghavan at media.osaka-cu.ac.jp>
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Question about FOSS4G Business Models
> To: "OSGeo Discussions" <discuss at lists.osgeo.org>, "OSGeo Marketing" <marketing at lists.osgeo.org>
> Date: Wednesday, 25 November, 2009, 9:09 AM
> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>   
> > 
> > 
> 
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