Faced with a new paradigm, an obvious question is what business models are suitable for this unfolding world of open source software.
The prospector analogy discussed earlier has definite applicability here. From the standpoint of a large corporation like IBM, open source software constitutes a resource to be drawn upon as a foundation for commercial software products. In The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman describes how IBM used the open source Apache Web server as the basis for its commercial WebSphere product, contributing code back to the project in return.
Another example mentioned earlier is Gentleware’s “Poseidon for UML,” which draws on the code base of the ArgoUML open source project (UML is Unified Modeling Language, a graphical language for software design), adding various capabilities. By employing this strategy, Gentleware has been able to greatly reduce its software development costs and market a proprietary product competing in features with the Rational Rose and Borland Together integrated software development environments but at a substantially lower price.
However, in her foreword to Open Sources 2.0 entitled “Source is Everything,” Kim Polese, the author of the construction industry metaphor for open source software discussed in an earlier chapter, puts little emphasis on this strategy. Instead she sees the business opportunities created by open source software as lying in creating value by combining pieces, including ones with little sale value in themselves, opening whole new market categories, and speaks of a “vast and growing new marketplace opened by a growing abundance of open source building materials.”
Polese also points out that while individual open source projects are concerned with the improvement of their own products and “care about how those products interoperate with other products, they can’t begin to account for all the combined possibilities where interoperation is required. That means that there is room for businesses to test, certify, and support combinations of open source products.”
In his 2000 paper “The Consulting HOWTO: A Guide to Open Source Consulting,” Gary Murphy identifies four business models for open source consulting: applications support, systems integration, participating in open source projects, and open source project management. Murphy suggests that in terms of consulting opportunities, offering applications support for specific open source software packages, particularly the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server, is ideal for the beginner in that it requires only a basic level of skill and experience.
Systems integration is more challenging, and can involve either pure open source systems or hybrid systems integrating open source and commercial applications – connecting Microsoft Access or Excel to a MySQL database, for example.
Participating as a volunteer in open source software development projects helps a consultant keep their skills current and makes him or her more valuable as a contractor for specific enhancements on that project. To the extent that a project has become so large and complex as to appear a Big Ball of Mud to outsiders, the services of a knowledgeable and experienced swamp guide become increasingly valuable. In “Open Source and the Small Entrepreneur” (Chapter 9 of Open Sources 2.0), Russ Nelson discusses different types of open source consulting, and Richard Shilling places this topic in a broader context in his 2005 LinuxWorld article, “Practical Open Source Business Models.”
Initiating or managing an open source software project for a client is apt to provide the most remunerative opportunities, but requires a high level of technical proficiency as well as a strong understanding of open source culture and software development processes. Other opportunities include offering services to support migration of documents and data from legacy applications to new open source applications and providing end-user training on open source applications and operating systems.