Bernie Gleason is talking about the business models for open source business applictions. From his experiences so far thinking about this, he echoes the earlier conversation that people are most comcerned about support and sustainability of open source software. “Believing is the easy part – trying to find models and ways of selling this to higher administration is the hard part – it’s so difficult to get buy-in and to have people consider changes in the way they do things.”
Bernie notes that brand names are used to suggest quality and sustainability, and that the well-known open source brands (Linux, Apache, Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL) are no exception.
Bernie suggested that the business models for companies working in the open source space may be similar – small core staffs, niche markets, community participation around bug fixes and improvement, etc.
