notes-openSourceBusinessModels

there's a lot of "open source business models" that have been proposed to answer the question of how to fund open source. here's six of them:

1) company sells tech support and consulting to go with their free, open-source products. e.g. IBM, Red Hat, Socialtext.

2) author writes a software library. They release it under a copyleft open-source license. because it's copyleft, other businesses can't legally incorporate it into closed source software of their own. therefore the open-source license is no use to them and they have to pay the original author for a corporate license. but open-source software writers can just use the free, open-source license. e.g. sleepycat software.

3) author is employed on research grants just like professors and postdocs (and maybe they are a professor or postdoc), or by a nonprofit. e.g. the GNU part of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD?, Octave.

4) authors are employed by other companies who are either seeking to have some control over the software, or who want to help with the software because it serves their other business interests. E.g. Linux kernel, OpenOffice?.

5) main product is open-source but some plugins are closed-source. usually these are plugins that no one but large corporations would want.

6) 2-year-old version of product is open-source but current version of product is closed-source.