

Open Core is over - sasvari
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Guest-commentary-Open-Core-is-over-1097073.html

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tptacek
Careful. The author of this article believes he's made an observation about
which open source model is more effective, but he hasn't. Rather, he's
observing that there are price-insensitive markets where it doesn't make sense
to hold back components, because you'll get paid either way.

A (niche) counterexample to this is Nessus, the most popular open source
security scanner. Until a few years ago, Nessus was entirely GPL with a
commercially-licensed counterpart product. But a huge chunk of Nessus' market
isn't F-500 companies with big IT budgets, but consultants, who are _very_
price sensitive. Tenable had to retreat from GPL altogether in later versions
because the market was free-riding.

It is not always the case that "the most open" product wins.

When you're selling mostly to big companies, IT managers will pay almost no
matter what; it's actually easier for them to sign a PO than it is to drive
adoption of a free offering, because IT organizations are organized around
purchasing-centric projects. So it makes sense that Red Hat would keep
everything maximally free, to capitalize on the marketing benefit of a
thriving community.

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nkassis
RedHat has always been a very cool case. They've managed to build on the
Service model everyone was trying back in the 90s and succeed.

They've had to focus on the enterprise because of this while many have tried
to do so for the desktop and failed Ubuntu is the last one I can think off
which is attempting to do this for the desktop. Ubuntu One is an interesting
attempt.

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runT1ME
I love the RedHat model. You _only_ pay for the value they provide. Otherwise,
you can run Fedora. Same with Jboss.

