bgulian / gmail.com wrote:
> On Jul 23, 12:20 am, Chad Perrin <per... / apotheon.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 11:05:09AM +0900, John Joyce wrote:
>>
> 
>> There are other business models than the governmentally enforced
>> artificial scarcity model where software is treated as physical product
>> units.
> 
> 
> What would those business models be? And are they so complex that the
> developer must spend a great deal of time devising and testing them
> rather than developing software?  I am tremendously grateful for OSS
> but I have yet to figure it out. It seems that most of it is based on
> some sort of patronage which is no business model at all.
There are quite a few different ones.  For example, free the software, 
charge for service.  It seems to work for (at least) Red Hat and MySQL. 
  Then you've got bigger companies (like IBM) who see the benefit of 
expanding the market or promoting an open standard on top of which they 
then sell a closed-source product.  Then there are companies like Neuros 
(http://www.neurosaudio.com/) who use open software to sell hardware. 
You could argue that Apple have partially done this with OS X and the 
tools that are distributed with it, but that relationship is more 
tenuous.  Then you've got software that's so important that the body 
behind it can survive on donations (Mozilla and Apache, to the best of 
my knowledge, work this way).

Those are just off the top of my head - I'm sure there are others.

-- 
Alex