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In preparation for my upcoming OSBC session, “Open-Core Licensing: The New Business Model Standard for Commercial Software,” I dug through some old presentations to try to figure out how monetization efforts have changed in commercial open-source companies.
Ultimately, revenue from open source boils down to understanding buyer types, as described [...]

Carahsoft Technology Corp., the trusted government IT solutions provider, today announced that it has been awarded a U.S. Department of Defense ESI Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) for Open Source Solutions. The contract encompasses software and support services from Red Hat, JBoss, Alfresco, Pentaho, MySQL, and CollabNet.
“This BPA is significant on several levels, as it affirms [...]

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Reading the excellent analysis of Arjen Lentz, founder of MySQL training company Open Query, of what the open-source database leader MySQL is (and isn’t) makes me wish that Oracle would have discovered MySQL as a complement, rather than as a competitor, several years ago.
MySQL’s is the database software of choice for the Web, [...]

Zack Urlocker of MySQL fame was at the Stanford Accel Symposium earlier this week and, along with some other open-source heavyweights, participated on a panel that attempted to cull some lessons learned in building open-source businesses.
If you didn’t get to attend the event, don’t panic. Urlocker has written up a few key principles.
Building an open-source [...]

My friend Matt Asay is reporting that MySQL CEO Maren Mickos is bailing from Sun Microsystems (JAVA), a year after Sun paid $1 billion for the open source database company. This follows by four months the exit by one of the MySQL founders, and a goodwill writedown of sizable fraction of the purchase price. The [...]

Michael “Monty” Widenius, the original developer of the open source MySQL database, has left Sun Microsystems and is starting his own company, Monty Program Ab, he said in a blog post Thursday.
Widenius and Sun had a slightly rocky relationship since the vendor bought MySQL last year for $1 billion. In a much-discussed November blog post, [...]

Microsoft, the commercial software behemoth from Redmond, Washington, continues to dip its toes into the open source pool. Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center (OSTC) is home to the software vendor’s relationships with a few open source products such as MySQL and SugarCRM. The OSTC has been hard at work lately — especially, in the web [...]

One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we’ve seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold.
I suspect that in 2009 it [...]