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the war between open source and proprietary software is over - and moreover that open source has won.

the war between open source and proprietary software is over - and moreover that open source has won.

Let's concentrate on a very specific aspect: making money out of open source projects' participation, building proprietary software leveraging open source ones.

highlight some differences of OSS business models in regards of the software stack being exploited: either a CCII (Common Content & Information Infrastructure) or a CEVA (Content Enabled Vertical Applications)

IBM proved long ago that it's possible to build billion-dollar businesses with Apache. But SpringSource is the first start-up to suggest that Apache isn't simply a way for big companies to create complements to proprietary cores. Sometimes an Apache core is worth something, too. At least $420 million, by SpringSource's reckoning.

In just over three years, four companies that Fenton invested in while at his current firm Benchmark Capital, or previous one, Accel Partners, have sold for a combined $1.6 billion. Fenton, who ranks on Forbes' Midas List at No. 50, was an investor in JBoss Inc. (sold to Red Hat Inc. for $350 million), Zimbra Inc. (acquired by Yahoo Inc. for $350 million), and XenSource Inc. (bought by Citrix Systems Inc. for $500 million). So what are the ingredients he looks for in a potential open-source investment?

Given Oracle's aggressive discounts, including its willingness to buy out the remainder of a customer's Red Hat contract, as Gartner reports, one would think that it would be flying high. But it's not. OEL has roughly 2 percent market share, compared to Red Hat's 60 percent market share. Enterprises aren't stupid: if Oracle's Linux story were compelling, they'd be buying. But they're clearly not.

while IT operations is the crux of making sales in open source, it might well be that open-source companies should focus on community development and avoid making too much money so that they can maintain a healthy valuation.

We generally feel that through developing most of our infrastructure code in public there are various benefits for us as a commercial vendor.

Your valuation can actually go down once you turn on revenue.

In a normal proprietary software company this means you've disqualified someone that isn't a customer in the pipeline, in the open source corporate world, I believe they sit in a different process. Instead of a manufacturing metaphor (pipelines) we need a more organic social metaphor to track success and growth of the community. Lead generation is a measure of community engagement. You want to grow your community. Customers will self-qualify.

Time and time again is that the best- in-class open source companies knowingly or unknowingly followed this formula: D x CR x ASP = $$ (or € £)

And the best open source license is …

while we expect Open-Core to remain a significant business model for 'pure-play' open-source companies, and we expect to see more software licensed under the Apache license, we don't see the two as being directly related.

Open innovation is taking over in many areas, and open source plays an important role especially in software sequential innovation, where each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors.

A great list of links relating to open source business models and development strategis.

A great list of links relating to open source business models and development strategis.