451: A classification of open source business strategies

It is 6:15am here in London and pretty close to freezing outside, a great time to catch up with the vast amounts of email that has been backing up in my inbox over the last couple of weeks.

First off the block; Matthew Aslett over at the 451 Group has made a gallant attempt to categorize the various open source business strategies that are out there today.

How does IBM’s open source strategy compare to Sun’s? Or Microsoft’s? What’s the difference between MySQL’s strategy and JasperSoft’s? Are some strategies better suited to engaging with organic open source communities, rather than inorganic? What on earth is the Open Core model?

These are some the questions we hoped to try and address with our Open Source is Not a Business Model report, published in October last year. As I mentioned yesterday, however, without an agreed set of definitions and a common vocabulary it is difficult for a broader understanding the implications of the various models to develop.

Matthew goes on to categorize Development Models, Vendor Licensing Strategies and Revenue Triggers.

There are an increasingly large group of people and companies, of which Microsoft is one, who believe that things have moved on from the simple scenario of Proprietary Software vs. Open Source to an environments where developers are drawing upon code that helps them solve their problems regardless of origin.

This post from 451 really helps outline how far some of those models have evolved, and how diverse the options are in today’s software industry.