The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Open Source: What's it Worth to You?
The scales have tipped. Open Source has gone from geeky to mainstream. In a survey of security managers, 53 percent said that given two software products with equivalent functionality, that they would choose Open Source over proprietary.
80 percent of those questioned said the main reason to consider Open Source was price. But the Open Source route doesn’t always mean free. And in fact many companies are learning how to effectively combine Open Source as part of an otherwise commercial for-fee strategy.
2007 has seen success by a number of Open Source vendors. Red Hat’s revenues are up 26 percent this year. SourceForge is up 35 percent. Novell’s Suse is valued at $210 million. And many more companies are scrambling to see how they too can adopt and reshape Open Source for their purposes, like Microsoft, Adobe, AutoDesk, 3Com, Intel and others.
A blog on ZDNet proposes that Open Source should move beyond free and to one where people can pay for perceived value. The idea is a little like PriceLine‘s name your own price. When you download the software you would have an opportunity to contribute an amount equal to the value that Open Source software provides you. You decide how little or how much you’d like to pay.
While the idea is interesting, it isn’t really new. There are already many sites that solicit contributions, typically via a PayPal link. Paying for “what it’s worth” though is probably not going to be sufficient to grow a sizable company founded on Open Source. A ‘blend’ approach, like that taken by Red Hat, Alfresco and others, makes more sense — a little bit of service revenue, a little bit from training and consulting, and a little bit from maintenance. If part of the blend includes contributions, that certainly won’t hurt, but revenue diversity is needed to derive a more predictable source of revenue and for companies to be able to survive long term.
