Working at Zope Corporation it shouldn't be surprising that
I get asked the
"How does a company that
develops/manages/publishes/guides/uses an open source
product make money?"
question at least five times per week.
As many already know Zope gives away the Zope Application
Server (Zope) and the Zope Content Management Framework
(CMF). We make money in several ways. We sell:
(a) services to write custom Zope-based applications
(b) "Visible Source" (Lux just called this View Source, Jay
Blanchard would call it "AL") software component licenses
for use in conjunction with (a), and/or for our customers to
use in their own internal projects. Visible Source
components are shipped with a non-redistribution clause on
what is, essentially, an open source license.
(c) managed hosting services for medium- and large-Zope-based
applications
(d) vertical market (e.g., for radio, TV, and print) ASP
services based on Zope
(e) services to enhance existing, customer-developed Zope
software
(f) support for existing Zope installations, and finally
(g) Zope Training
<Rob's opinion>
Why can we do this? Why can we invest a substantial
amount of time, money and emotion into the ongoing
development of Zope (e.g., Zope 2.7 and 3.0) and have a
business that works? Because Zope is a _platform_, not
an application. We don't sell products, we sell
solutions. I consider mySQL, PHP, Mozilla and most
other successful open source projects as platforms --
said the other way, successful open source projects are
successful _because_ they're platforms, not products.
If your business is selling product then I can't think
of a way for you to make money in open source... If your
business is either (i) selling product-specific services
or (ii) selling add-on components to a platform then I
know you can make money giving away the platform. It's
cliche but this is the same as the razor/razor-blade or
cell-phone/cell-phone-service. Do razors or cell phones
really cost $1 USD? Of course not.
Zope and the Zope CMF, even when combined, do relatively
little out of the box. It's possible, given just a
small amount of time (< 1 week in many cases) to make
Zope sing and dance.
In our experience, however, not everyone likes the same
kind of music and dancing. Some like rock, some like
classical, etc.. Furthermore, the larger the customer,
the more convinced they are that their preferred music
genre is THE ONLY music genre and the less likely they
are to be convinced that an alternative genre could be
fun to listen to as well. In fairness the larger the
customer, the larger the number and variety of incumbent
systems and business processes there are to integrate
with. It's this integration that leads to the large
integration costs we've discussed so many times on the
list.
Open source is not the answer for every business or
every piece of technology but it can work well for some.
</Rob's opinion>
Regards,
Rob
--
http://cms-list.org/
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