How Open Source Ate Software: Understand the Open Source Movement and So Much More

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

G. HaffHow Open Source Ate Softwarehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6800-1_6

6. Business Models and Accelerated Development

Gordon Haff¹  

(1)

Lancaster, MA, USA

 

When many people first hear about businesses that make their living selling open source software, their first question is usually something like “How can you sell something that’s available for free?” That complicated answer is addressed in this chapter.

Even restricting the discussion to “free as in beer” doesn’t simplify it much. The business world is full of examples of free and paid services or products supporting and subsidizing each other in various ways. While common, it can be a hard formula ...