Thanks for the perspective. I'm a big fan of Zope, although we don't use it because it's not in PHP. :(
I struggle very much with my love of Open Source, and the need to make money, and I would love to open source our software but don't have the ability currently to make that leap from product-based company to services-based company. We also target a different market than Zope, since your revenue comes from services on top of the platform (great analogy, I'd like to think of our software as the same, even if we package it like a product :)), whereas in addition to the platform aspect where people create derivative products and solutions, we also sell largely through small web design/development companies looking for something to enhance their offering and give them that extra oomph over their competitors, and they're typically not looking for services of any kind.
While I see this market dissipating in a few years when the Open Source CMS systems begin appealing to them "out of the box", it exists today and gives us that needed edge. But who knows, one day I'd love to say we're the Zope of the PHP World! :)
Cheers,
Lux
On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 02:05 PM, Rob Page wrote:
Working at Zope Corporation it shouldn't be surprising that I get asked the"How does a company that develops/manages/publishes/guides/uses an open source product make money?" question at least five times per week. As many already know Zope gives away the Zope Application Server (Zope) and the Zope Content Management Framework (CMF). We make money in several ways. We sell: (a) services to write custom Zope-based applications (b) "Visible Source" (Lux just called this View Source, Jay Blanchard would call it "AL") software component licenses for use in conjunction with (a), and/or for our customers to use in their own internal projects. Visible Source components are shipped with a non-redistribution clause on what is, essentially, an open source license. (c) managed hosting services for medium- and large-Zope-based applications (d) vertical market (e.g., for radio, TV, and print) ASP services based on Zope (e) services to enhance existing, customer-developed Zope software (f) support for existing Zope installations, and finally (g) Zope Training <Rob's opinion> Why can we do this? Why can we invest a substantial amount of time, money and emotion into the ongoing development of Zope (e.g., Zope 2.7 and 3.0) and have a business that works? Because Zope is a _platform_, not an application. We don't sell products, we sell solutions. I consider mySQL, PHP, Mozilla and most other successful open source projects as platforms -- said the other way, successful open source projects are successful _because_ they're platforms, not products. If your business is selling product then I can't think of a way for you to make money in open source... If your business is either (i) selling product-specific services or (ii) selling add-on components to a platform then I know you can make money giving away the platform. It's cliche but this is the same as the razor/razor-blade or cell-phone/cell-phone-service. Do razors or cell phones really cost $1 USD? Of course not. Zope and the Zope CMF, even when combined, do relatively little out of the box. It's possible, given just a small amount of time (< 1 week in many cases) to make Zope sing and dance. In our experience, however, not everyone likes the same kind of music and dancing. Some like rock, some like classical, etc.. Furthermore, the larger the customer, the more convinced they are that their preferred music genre is THE ONLY music genre and the less likely they are to be convinced that an alternative genre could be fun to listen to as well. In fairness the larger the customer, the larger the number and variety of incumbent systems and business processes there are to integrate with. It's this integration that leads to the large integration costs we've discussed so many times on the list. Open source is not the answer for every business or every piece of technology but it can work well for some. </Rob's opinion> Regards, Rob -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
-- John Luxford Simian Systems _______________________ phone : 204.946.5955 email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] web : www.simian.ca _______________________ web content management application development consulting and training -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.