The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource magazine is out, talking about starting open-source based businesses. It also announces a name change, to “Technology Innovation Management Review”. The reason, according to the editor, is that the original purpose of the magazine was to explain how you could make money creating or using open source software. People seem to have figured that out now…
The question now is how do you make your (probably open source using) business grow. I totally believe that now based on the number of businesses that have sprung up based around open source software; it used to be much harder to find a commercial backer for a project that let you see the source code. Now, it’s practically commonplace. (examples added off the top of my head.)
Thanks for the link. :)
Every successful open source project can build a business around it, and really it’s critical to the long-term success. The one major exception to that is operating systems, but they get massive efforts put into them by people paid to work on them by a variety of interests and sources (all the BSDs, the Linux kernel, etc.). As one example, if you look at projects similar to pfSense, the only ones that have long term growth and constant development are those with commercial backing who have people employed full time working on them. IPCop and m0n0wall are two examples of projects without commercial backing, and development on both has slowed to a crawl. Both started out strong, but as core contributors move on to other interests (usually to make a living) the projects stagnate. m0n0wall has picked up a bit of late, which is promising, but still not nearly the progress you see in all the commercially-backed projects. Google Trends tells the story well.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=pfsense%2C+ipcop%2C+m0n0wall
I’ve enjoyed OSBR since the first issue quite some time ago, looking forward to where it’s going from here with the new focus.