Posted by James Benson on 11/05/05 14:32

Some companies charge for support and still make money from their open
source projects!




bruce wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just a quick question. Had a conversation with a person who works for a
> non-profit, and she was describing some of her dealings with obtaining
> grants for the development of 'open source' apps.Got me to thinking. If a
> company sponsored the initial development of an 'open source' kind of app
> (the exact licensing would need to be fleshed out) what do yout think would
> be the response of people to work on the apps..
>
> I started to wnoder if there would be a pool of talented people who would be
> interested in working on projects that are initially funded. The funding
> would go to pay the resources, set up the project, do initial grass roots
> marketing, etc... The idea would be to focus in on the
> projects/technologies/apps that a given business would agree to initially
> support/fund.
>
> Thoughts/comments/etc...
>
> -bruce
> bedouglas@earthlink.net
>
> ps. I'm not talking about a freshmeat.net/sourceforge kind of environment.
> The obvious goal of this kind of process would be to turn small
> applications/projects into profitable applications. My curiousity is whether
> you could then create applications/services that could be built along the
> same model as nagios/mysql/etc.. where you have a free/open version, as well
> as a fee based application/service.

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