Re:How do you make money on free software? (Score 1)

I think the question of whether support is a good model or not depends on what market you are going after. If you are looking at enterprise software, there is a lot of value in offering support, because few of these companies are going to deploy Open Source software without someone to support it. These companies are not worried about getting support for "How do I use a Web Server", they're looking for someone to turn to when their servers drop dead after being pushed hard for a week straight. When you start dealing with server software, it is often sufficiently complex (out of necessity) and needs to have sufficiently high quality of service that in many cases they see support as an insurance policy. If their servers go down at 1:00am on a sunday, they need to ahve someone that can help come in and fix them immediately. Enterprise support is not a theoretical market. Currently, many companies that sell server software also sell support for 20% of the license revenue per year. Since, the market for infrastructure software (middleware, databases, etc) is about $14 billion per year, that means that support alone for this market is about $3 billion a year. This is one of the reasons I think Enterprise Software is such a great match for Open Source. You have an existing market, and you have an additional desire of many companies to get away from vendor lock-in. Open Source is able to not only break vendor lock-in, but by doing so allows a rich market place of vendors to compete for the support contracts. In the current model where one company owns the source code, they also own the support.