Nice article:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/59591?source=NWWNLE_nlt_daily_am_2010-04-02
Tidbits...
Overall though Charles is a big fan of open source. He thinks it offers a higher quality product than proprietary software. Regardless of whether it is open or not, Charles is going to pay for support, so paying for open source support is not odd to him at all. Frankly, at this point Charles is not 100% sure if the open source supported solution is much cheaper than the non-open solution. He is using the open source solution because he believes it is better. It is better he believes because it is built on open source.
If you get nothing else out of this blog post, get that. People are paying for open source solutions, whether we call them open core with commercial features or not, because they think they are a superior solution
"Who pays for open source software? People who think that they are getting the best solution for the money. They are not being fooled or foolish. They think the people who would not pay for these solutions are the fools."
"An interesting point about both Alfresco and MuleSoft is that they claim much of their revenue comes from subscriptions. So it is not just the "support model" for commercial open source. They are selling
services, expanding channels, doing all of the things that any enterprise software company should be to be successful."
"The old questions about the validity of the business model and whether enterprise class customers would adopt open source solutions seem to have fallen by the wayside."
