Xen is one of those things where the market is SO DAMN HUGE that even
the very SMALL proportion of money that an open source company can
wring from the marketplace is actually non-trivial in an absolute
sense. If Red Hat is only monetizing 0.01% of the Linux marketplace,
that's still fine, because they are making millions. The best market
places seem to be "enterprise" software with large new markets.
Examples of success stories are JBoss, Red Hat, Sleepycat, MySQL, and
note that the last two are actually "sort of" open source companies,
in that they still fall back on the software-for-sale model for
revenues.
The trouble with the geospatial marketplace is that it is relatively
small, so the small proportion an open source company can monetize is
smaller still. The problem with service-oriented FOSS businesses is
that they don't make money from software, so the easiest thing to cut
in budgeting is core software development. Let the product languish
for a while, it doesn't cost you anything as long as service business
keeps flowing in. Or, in the case of pure consultancies, don't do
any core development at all, just use the software. The service-
oriented FOSS business I think has serious structural problems, not
around providing good service, but around strong incentives to
nourish the underlying software.
P.
On 3-Jan-08, at 8:58 AM, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 10:26:51AM -0500, Lucena, Ivan wrote:
Hi all,
I am *not* going to disagree with Andrea, Gilberto, Paul, Howard or
anybody else. I just want to point out a interesting open source
business model that is making a big impact this days. I am talking
about
Xen [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen].
I keep reading news and more news about new commercial products
from big
software companies based on Xen. Is that possible on the GIS world?
Depending on what you're reading (I can't tell from a quick Google
which
types of stories you're talking about), I'm not sure how Xen really
plays a part in the commercialization. Xen can be used to host
products
in a virtual environment, and if that is the case, there's no money
being made off *Xen*, money is being made off the other software.
I could be wrong. I just didn't find anything to back up either way in
the Wikipedia and related links.
Regards,
--
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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